generic.digital.work.surface

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; The Premiere of a Koolhaas Fantasy - New York Times

2008-01-02T00:59:00.000-05:00

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; The Premiere of a Koolhaas Fantasy - New York Times

E-Motion

2007-12-29T14:41:00.000-05:00

Hollein

2007-12-14T22:13:00.000-05:00

Just to keep this thing alive as I am fully immersed in work, here are random images from Hollein's website:

And to make us all feel better that success isn't dependent on your thesis, here's Hollein's "Masters Dissertation." I think we should start calling it that too. Also, we probably have to redefine success a little to make that joke work.

international

2007-11-30T23:33:00.000-05:00

The League of Nations Competition
This competition drew an international field of architects. It was a very challenging program. The complex was to contain a giant assembly hall, lobbies a secretariat and a wide variety of bureaucratic functions for the newly formed world parliament, which had set itself the idealistic mission of restoring peace and order after World War I. Probably the two most intriguing designs were those of Le Corbusier and Hannes Meyer.

Le Corbusier placed the emphasis of his design on the assembly hall, with a processional courtyard leading up to the main entry and the rear elevation prominently expressed on the lakeside. The various bureaucratic functions of the complex were housed in linear blocks raised above the landscape, so that one could pass freely underneath the office buildings. The overall effect was that of “a communal machine for enlightened, well-meaning functionaries whose life would be daily nourished through contact with nature,” Curtis noted.

By contrast, Meyer sought a more Constructivist approach, with the emphasis placed on the secretariat in an open-framed tower that recalled some of the visions of the Russian avant-garde. He used a highly repetitive ordering system throughout the complex with the only expressive element being a bulbous glass roof over the assembly hall. Meyer intentionally played down hierarchical
associations as he saw the complex as being “an entirely open, egalitarian forum.”

Of the 337 entries, which were published in a catalog, Sigfried Giedion also noted
those by Neutra, Mendelsohn, and Polish Group Prezens. He felt that the new
program challenged conventional ideas and resulted in a victory for modernism.
However, the selection committee split over the diverse entries, declaring P.H.
Nénot’s “clumsy Beaux-Arts scheme” the winner, after disqualifying Le Corbusier’s
project on a technicality. This competition served as a catalyst for the formation of
CIAM in 1928."

Beyond the Spectacle

2007-11-30T22:42:00.000-05:00

Beyond the Spectacle: "“There are a number of these parastatal development companies,” de Graaf says. “They are private companies but still majority-owned by the royal family, which creates a very interesting mix of business and politics that would be taboo anywhere else but makes them incredibly forceful and determined. These companies are not just active in Dubai; they’re active in a zone of very rapidly growing cities that stretches from Morocco to China—they’re even building in California. They’re often precisely the kind of cities that no one in the West talks about or has much time for. You could say that the formula of Dubai, whatever you think of it, is shaping the world.”"

Breuer UNESCO

2007-11-29T18:15:00.001-05:00

CLIMATE CHANGE, BUDGET, CAPITAL MASTER PLAN, MIDDLE EAST AMONG ISSUES AS SECRETARY-GENERAL BRIEFS INFORMAL MEETING OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY

2007-11-28T22:54:00.000-05:00

CLIMATE CHANGE, BUDGET, CAPITAL MASTER PLAN, MIDDLE EAST AMONG ISSUES AS SECRETARY-GENERAL BRIEFS INFORMAL MEETING OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY:

"Let us also look to our own house. I am determined to ensure that the United Nations system is ready to act in a unified manner to support Member States, during both the negotiation and implementation phases. The United Nations Chief Executives Board is working on honing United Nations system coordination, and on an inventory of United Nations system capacities and activities. We will strive to go to Bali with a common message of what the United Nations system can offer to Member States. And we will come to the General Assembly in February ready to discuss what may be possible and what would be optimal for the future.

We will also strive to make the United Nations family lead by example, by moving towards carbon neutrality in our operations worldwide. This process has already started in parts of the UN system. Our upcoming renovation of the UN Headquarters in New York, under the Capital Master Plan, should dramatically advance this important agenda.

As you know, the Capital Master Plan is a monumental and historic undertaking to renovate and make safe our Headquarters. I am deeply grateful that Member States have reacted positively to my proposal for a revised strategy. If approved, this plan will mean that the disruption to the Secretariat will last for only three years instead of six, and the conference buildings will be done in two stages rather than three.

We have been providing Member States with details and information at a series of informal sessions of the Fifth Committee, which is now in the final stages of negotiating a draft resolution. Broad agreement is emerging on most aspects of the revised strategy, although there remain some concerns related to particular details.

Allow me to reassure you on one point in particular: the CMP process will ensure maximum transparency, visibility and adherence to the existing United Nations Procurement Rules. I very much hope there will be an agreement when the Fifth Committee meets this afternoon.

As Chief Administrative Officer, I am committed to translating financial resources into real achievements. This requires balancing varied and often conflicting priorities. It also requires careful fiscal management. I have submitted the regular budget for the biennium, along with several proposals that I believe will contribute to make our United Nations faster, more flexible, more transparent and more efficient in delivering better results with the finite assets at our disposal.

In this session, the management highlights are information and communications technology, revamping our internal justice system, and, as I mentioned earlier, the Capital Master Plan. Let me express my deep appreciation to Member States for the rigorous efforts and time they have devoted to the administration of justice. I am hopeful that we will have an agreement that will be a great improvement for the Organization as a whole."

Without Action Now, the UN Capital Master Plan Is Not Going Anywhere Anytime Soon - UN Reform - Global Policy Forum

2007-11-28T22:51:00.000-05:00

Without Action Now, the UN Capital Master Plan Is Not Going Anywhere Anytime Soon - UN Reform - Global Policy Forum: "The initiative for the Capital Master Plan started in 1995 when the General Assembly decided to look carefully at the problem of the deteriorating building. The detailed review and analysis of the building status was completed by early 2001. Member states then considered two approaches to updating the building: an accelerated maintenance effort and a complete rebuilding. The later concept was endorsed and entitled the 'Capital Master Plan' in 2001. The plan has a rather simple goal: to make all the existing buildings code compliant by bringing them up to today's building standards. According to Reuter, 'The project was from the beginning defined as respect for the historical significance of the site, not an expansion of space or a new center for world government. The fundamental Capital Master Plan scope is: what you see is what you get, it just gets us up to the latest building standards, equipment and systems.'

The member states then considered what would be the best strategy for completely renovating UN headquarters: either in a single phase by moving everyone off-site, or a longer phased project with most functions remaining functional on-site. An architect was hired in 2001 to look at all the possible alternatives of each strategy and, in the end, it was decided that a single phase approach was more desirable. Simultaneous with this UN study, the UN Development Corporation, which is not affiliated with the UN, but acts as the landlord of much of the UN's office space that is located off of headquarters, indicated an interest in building a "swing space" building for the Capital Master Plan on the Robert Moses Park. The UN and the Development Corporation then embarked on an effort to make their two plans work together. But, by early 2005, these efforts were stalled. Early rental projections for the Development Corporation's "swing space" building had risen from $95 million to almost $250 million due to a number of factors, including construction cost pressures following the recovery from September 11th, 2001. Additionally, the New York State Legislature refused to approve the new building.

Ambassador Luers has been involved in talks about the capital master plan since 1998, largely due to his idea and push for a UN Visitors Center that would accompany a newly renovated UN campus. The center, which would be privately funded, would enhance the educational purpose of the organization and would be housed underground beneath the north lawn. The center proposal was received by Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Secretariat with enthusiastic support, and was actually approved by the General Assembly as part of the 2001 Capital Master Plan. Like the rest of the plan, the center too has been held up by repeated setbacks. "If the UN's host government, the US government, does not get firmly behind this project," said Amb. Luers, "it will not happen no matter what the UN system tries to accomplish. Meanwhile, a great deal of money is being wasted, the UN's buildings are being put increasingly at risk and the project is losing highly qualified professionals who could get the job done.

As it stands now, the future of the Capital master Plan is problematic. In response to questions about opportunities for UNA USA to assist in moving the project along, Reuter talked about a number of efforts and ideas that might benefit the plan:

• Provide clear and factual information to the US public, Congress and the media;

• Consider involving an international body of architectural opinion—beyond that of the US—to encourage the preservation and restoration of the buildings. For example, Reuter recently traveled to Brazil at the suggestion of several South American countries to meet with original architect Oscar Niemeyer, now 98 years old; and

• Consider the development of the aforementioned Visitor's Center to provide information about the UN and capital master plan in advance of the renovation project.

"The dialogue that is currently going on, far above mere architects like myself, is what is the future of the United Nations and how is it to work going forward, and I think until that is done, the politics of the capital master plan may remain tied to that dialogue," said Reuter. "All of [the nations are], I think, holding their breaths that the buildings will still be there when they finish this argument.""

New York Architecture Images- United Nations Headquarters

2007-11-28T22:28:00.000-05:00

New York Architecture Images- United Nations Headquarters: "s Built for an important international organization, this modern complex helped revitalize New York City at the end of the second world war. Located between First Avenue and the East River at the terminus of 42nd Street, the 18-acre site was donated to the newly-formed United Nations by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. To facilitate access to the UN site, Robert Moses (then the city's construction coordinator) diverted traffic from First Avenue. The centerpiece of the UN complex is the Secretariat, an International Style skyscraper based on plans by Le Corbusier, one of the most well-known modern architects. The actual design for the building was carried out by an international team of architects under the direction of Wallace Harrison. This 39-story building was the first major International Style building to be constructed in New York. Typical of the International Style are its simple, geometric form, the absence of historical references, and its glass curtain wall. The architects' use of green glass, marble, and bands of metal detailing are modifications to the modern architectural vocabulary. Located on a highly visible site and surrounded by open spaces, this tower is the only freestanding skyscraper in New York.

The International Style, which originated in Europe, had social and political implications as it was frequently associated with progressive, reform-oriented architects and patrons. Here it symbolizes the international, benevolent functions of the UN but its soaring height makes a specific reference to America and to New York in particular. Although the building makes an interesting formal statement, it is not necessarily functional. The narrow floors are too cramped for the office spaces and its large expanses of glass have caused problems with temperature regulation inside the building. Despite these problems, this building helped to revitalize Midtown and the neighborhoods along the East River during a period when it was most needed."

My First UN Visit

2007-11-28T14:26:00.000-05:00

The pictures are nowhere near as informative as the visit was, but I figured I would post them nonetheless:

Gothamist: Schumer Calls UN Building a "Fire Trap"

2007-11-28T01:34:00.000-05:00

Gothamist: Schumer Calls UN Building a "Fire Trap": "Senator Charles Schumer painted a grim picture of what could happen during an emergency at the United Nations' headquarters as he asked that the UN's much-delayed renovation to move ahead. Schumer noted that that if the Secretariat building 'were owned by a private company there would be so many violations the government could close it down.' The Secretariat has no internal sprinkler system and does not comply with many city fire and safety codes, plus asbestos could fill the area if old steam pipes explode and if many fire trucks were parked in a plaza, they could fall into the underground parking. At this point, there has been much talk of a U.N. building renovation, most recently with discussions about where the U.N. will or will not rent temporary office space, but nothing conclusive about the renovation has been decided. One thing holding up the renovation: The U.S. doesn't want to fund the $1.6 billion project."

Cost of U.N. Renovation Soars to $1.9 Billion - November 17, 2005 - The New York Sun

2007-11-28T01:31:00.000-05:00

Cost of U.N. Renovation Soars to $1.9 Billion - November 17, 2005 - The New York Sun: "Initial planning for the project was conducted in 2000 and again in 2002, yielding a cost estimate of $1.2 billion. The United Nations determined it needed to empty its premises entirely during the renovations, citing dangers posed by asbestos and other construction hazards. Offices of the world body were to be temporarily housed in a 900,000-square-foot, 35-story 'swing space' to be erected by the United Nations Development Corporation, a city-state public benefit corporation, over a neighboring city park.

Because the New York State Legislature did not issue the approvals necessary for the U.N. to seize Robert Moses Playground, the U.N. sought to rent about 700,000 square feet of commercial office space as an alternative.

Today's report, however, states that the 'failure of plans for the UNDC5 building,' as the swing space is called by the U.N., render it 'no longer a realistic option for swing space in the foreseeable future.' Moreover, 'no commercial solutions were found to accommodate the activities of the General Assembly and other intergovernmental organs,' the report states.

As a result, the secretary-general is recommending that the world body undertake its renovation in stages, under one of the four strategies for the refurbishment project set forth in the new report. Under "Strategy IV," the option endorsed by the secretary-general, a "phased approach" is undertaken. Ten floors of the Secretariat building at a time would be vacated and renovated, and the United Nations would lease approximately 228,000 square feet of commercial space in Midtown Manhattan to house the displaced staff.

The world body would also rent commercial space in Long Island City to temporarily house the Dag Hammarskjold Library, and would erect temporary conference facilities on the U.N.'s North Lawn, a park on the world body's campus that is closed to the public. Under all four options, the U.N. would abandon plans to renovate the building occupied by the U.N. Institute for Training and Research, and today's report suggests the possibility of jettisoning that building as a U.N. property altogether, saying it "is not a cost-effective building to operate over the long term.

...

The project would be completed in 2014, four years later than the United Nations said it had hoped to finish the upgrades."

After 10 Years and 3 Plans, U.N. Renovation Is in Sight - New York Times

2007-11-28T01:18:00.000-05:00

NOT THAT I DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS COMING IN SOME WAY, BUT,
THIS IS CAUSE FOR EITHER CELEBRATION OR THESIS-CRASH.

After 10 Years and 3 Plans, U.N. Renovation Is in Sight - New York Times:

"Cruise ships, barges, islands, tent settlements, a 30-story annex, a Wal-Mart-size building, even Brooklyn.

All of them have been proposed by increasingly desperate United Nations officials as the place to locate thousands of employees and delegates while the organization’s stylishly timeless but dangerously antiquated 39-story headquarters are refurbished.

This decade-long search has ended now with a decision to begin a five-year, $1.876 billion renovation of the complex in the spring and to house the 2,600 people who must move out in rented space in Manhattan, across the East River in Long Island City and a temporary conference building on the United Nations campus.

...

Those failings are serious, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg underlined in October by demanding that the organization immediately improve its fire safety plans with sprinklers, smoke detectors and exit signs or he would prohibit visits by city students to the building and alert the public to the danger. The United Nations has pledged to make the adjustments in the coming months.

...

The elaborate rehabilitation plan, which the General Assembly is expected to approve soon, is the third in a decade. Like many other urgent items on the United Nations agenda, the mission has met with repeated delays.

...

The first plan was halted in 2005 when the New York State Legislature, angry about diplomats’ unpaid parking tickets, mismanagement of the Iraq oil-for-food program and what lawmakers viewed as the United Nations’ anti-Israel bias, refused to pass enabling legislation to construct a new annex on an underused city playground next door.

The second was abandoned a year later after its architect, Louis Frederick Reuter IV, a veteran of large project management in New York, grew tired of fighting persistent objections from Congress and United Nations bureaucrats. He resigned.

The author of the new plan is Michael Adlerstein, 62, an affable Brooklyn-born former National Park Service architect involved in the preservations of Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the New York Botanical Garden and the Taj Mahal and a man with 20 years of experience dealing with lawmakers in Washington.

...

“I took the job because it’s an ideal challenge for an architect at this point in my career,” he said. “It’s an iconic building of great stature in the world. You can show a picture of this building to people in remote, rural locations in the world and everyone will know it.”

While the famous exteriors will be unchanged, the insides will be brought up to 21st century standards of efficiency and security and reconfigured to consume 40 percent less energy.

The glass curtain wall will be replaced by a heavily laminated one that appears identical but is far stronger and able to withstand the blast of a bomb attack.

Energy-saving additions include sensors that turn off lights in unoccupied rooms and solar power systems.

...

“Ten years from now there will be no way to tell that the U.N. was renovated unless you look at the Con Ed bill,” Mr. Adlerstein said. He said that he was well aware of the bribery scandals that have scarred the reputation of the United Nations procurement department but that Skanska, the Swedish company that is the construction manager, and his own people would make sure nothing like that recurred.

...

The cost of the project will be borne by the 192 member states in supplementary annual dues over the five-year period, with the United States responsible for 22 percent, or $413 million. The United Nations has leased office floors in a building at 305 East 46th Street and is negotiating for space nearby and in Lower Manhattan and Long Island City."

Programming (the UN etc)

2007-11-21T21:59:00.000-05:00

Ok, so the last few days have been considering program. To cut to the chase:

I had a brainstorming session (with AB) about program. I came up with 5 or 6 interesting ones. The big caveats were:
- "You are using the UN etc. to make arguments about architecture and agency, not about world peace and the like."
- "I should be able to distill program (that is interesting/important to me) from these, the arguments themselves are not the only things that matter (ie program is more important than argument/scenario)

Images of the blackboard (being as transparent and candid as possible here):

Based on this, I thought about 6 programs for a while. So far, the UN is the only one that has really gone anywhere fast. So in the spirit of ruthlessness and expediency, here is a slideshow ruminating on the UN as program, and Hong Kong and New York as sites. Its sort of all over the map and and loosely structured, but its doing something.

PLUS, ITS EXCITING! I am actually very into all this, and it dovetails really well with all my previous research. So, ruminations on other programs will proceed and summaries will be forthcoming, but for now,

HERE ARE SOME THOUGHTS ON THE UN AS OFFERING A THESIS (Including Proposal-ly things)

Hong Kong - Ackbar Abbas

2007-11-21T18:52:00.000-05:00

Hong Kong and the Culture of Disappearance An Interview with Ackbar Abbas By Geert Lovink

In a place like Hong Kong, different moments of history now seem to be out of step with each other.What interests me is how to describe the little movements, certain happenings in the everyday life -- the unacknowledged historical processes.In your lecture you spoke of the newly erected monument to the victims of Tiananmen Square in Victory Park, made by a Danish artist, as an ugly piece of kitsch which fitted into a series of spectacular events taking place during the Handover. This was within the realm of the simulacra of politics. On the other side, you said that there is indeed the possibility of a true form of modernity in local Hong Kong politics and aesthetics. You have found this in Hong Kong cinema. Do you see films from, for example, Wong Kar-wai, as an alternative to the political kitsch?In the line of options that can be opened up, we could look at another dominant cultural form in Hong Kong which is architecture. Building infrastructure is one of the biggest projects going on, worldwide. However, there is very little reflection on building.AA: When I came across the Koolhaas' article, 'The Generic City' I liked it because it was both against architectural snobbery and anti-identity. It discussed questions like repetition and seriality -- a whole new discourse on the city which might allow us to rethink the ways we produce it. Naming what is going on and by doing so, intervening in the process of creating a new urban space, bringing architecture in line with the artworld. However I was disappointed by the argument in the end. On the one hand, you have the anti-identity, which becomes the ruling one. It is a little bit like the Baudrillard argument of the silent masses where silence now becomes a form of imploded resistance. It can only be taken so far. In places like Hong Kong and Singapore, the 'generic' just means capital, low production costs and placing architecture outside the realm of other social values. Architecture becomes a purely practical process. One of the ways of avoiding the social question for the architect is by saying 'I am a builder.' However I think that Koolhaas is onto something that needs further development. I would like to see this urbanism as a genre, like in cinema. We should not celebrate it, but instead, within the genre of the generic city, make a twist, if architecture is going to make any claim to social responsibility. This is what we tried to do at the conference in Hong Kong about architecture and cultural studies -- to open up the dialogue with the architects. What kind of building would you like to see? How can architects work within the economic restraints? Once you asked these questions, you are already doing something. We all have a responsibility. It is also a question of specialisation. Architecture is not just engineering, it is not just construction, it is also social construction.Opening up a dialogue is certainly what we want, but there are certain ground rules. It should not be a dialogue between East and West, simply because as soon as you say that, the positions are defined beforehand. By the same token, it should not be a dialogue between the Architect and the Theorist. It is the same issue: both are facing a common problem, which is how to deal with social processes. My model here would be Walter Benjamin's essay on translation. The translation, not just as a true copy of the original, but as the incomplete, full of faults. It would be an interesting model for what a dialogue would be. It is a question of cultural translation.

2007-11-21T13:44:00.001-05:00

SECRETARY-GENERAL APPOINTS MICHAEL ADLERSTEIN OF UNITED STATES EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF CAPITAL MASTER PLAN

2007-11-16T00:08:00.000-05:00

SECRETARY-GENERAL APPOINTS MICHAEL ADLERSTEIN OF UNITED STATES EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF CAPITAL MASTER PLAN: "United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today announced the appointment of Michael Adlerstein of the United States as Executive Director of the Capital Master Plan at the Assistant Secretary-General level. Most recently, Mr. Adlerstein was the Vice-President and Architect of the New York Botanical Garden, America’s oldest and most respected centre for horticulture, botanical research and education.

In the 1980s, Mr. Adlerstein was the Project Director for the restoration of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the most ambitious historic restoration project ever undertaken by the United States Department of the Interior. He led the master planning team and managed the team of architects, engineers, landscape architects and other consultants through the planning and design process and later managed the complexities of construction on Ellis Island. The success of the project led to his promotion to Chief Historical Architect. As such, he was recognized as the national expert in the field of historic preservation, advising the National Park Service Director and the Secretary of the Interior on all historic preservation issues.

During his National Park Service career, Mr. Adlerstein managed the planning, design and construction programme for the north-east region, including complex partnership projects at Gettysburg, Valley Forge, Acadia and Jamestown. Throughout the north-east region, he directed the design and construction process for major rehabilitation, stabilization and restoration of public facilities, visitor centres, historic buildings, utility systems, exhibits and other infrastructure.

Mr. Adlerstein, a New York native, received his architectural degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Colombia and has worked as a State Department consultant on preservation issues on numerous projects, including the preservation of the Taj Mahal. He has been recognized for his contributions to the field of architecture with numerous awards, and in 1994 was made a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects."

IBM Cloud Computing

2007-11-15T10:37:00.001-05:00

"In recent years, I.B.M. has championed efforts to make data centers more efficient and to centralize more computing tasks in the data centers, with desktops and devices tapping in. These have had names like "autonomic," "utility" and grid computing.
Those concepts and research efforts have made a contribution to cloud computing. Experts say tools have been added to spread computing tasks across clusters of many machines and to make programming simpler. Advances likely to broaden the reach of cloud computing have often come from researchers tackling the challenges posed by Internet searches.
"In some ways, the cloud is a natural next step from the grid-utility model," said Frank Gens, an analyst at the research firm IDC. "What's different is the Google programming model, and that really opens things up. You don't have to be a Stanford or Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. to program cloud applications.""

Cunard: The Most Famous Ocean Liners in the World (sm)

2007-11-14T19:18:00.000-05:00

Cunard: The Most Famous Ocean Liners in the World (sm):

Length:	1,132 feet
Beam:	135 feet
Beam at Bridge Wings:	147.5 feet
Draft:	32 feet 10 inches
Height (Keel to Funnel):	236.2 feet
Gross Tonnage:	Approximately 151,400 gross tonnes
Guest Capacity:	2,592 lower berths 3,056 maximum capacity (Including third and fourth berths)
Crew:	1,253
Cruise Speed:	28.5 Knots
Power:	157,000 horsepower, environmentally friendly, gas turbine/diesel electric plant
Propulsion:	Four pods of 21.5 MW each; 2 fixed and 2 azimuthing
Strength:	Extra thick steel hull for strength and stability for Transatlantic Crossings
Stabilizers:	Two sets
Cost:	Estimated $800 million

Some Comparisons:

QM2 is five times longer than Cunard's first ship, Britannia (230 ft.)
QM2 is 113 feet longer than the original Queen Mary
QM2 is more than twice as long as the Washington Monument is tall (550 ft.)
QM2 is 147 feet longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall (984 ft.)
QM2 is more than 3½ times as long as Westminster Tower (Big Ben) is high (310 ft.)
QM2 is only 117 feet shorter than the Empire State Building is tall (1248 ft.)
QM2 is more than three times as long as St. Paul's Cathedral is tall (366 ft.)
QM2 is as long as 41 double-decker London buses (31½ ft. each)
QM2's whistle is audible for 10 miles

More Interesting Facts:

In 1839, Queen Victoria awarded Samuel Cunard the first ever licence to deliver mail across the Atlantic, proudly granting his steam ship the honoured title RMS (Royal Mail Steamer). In 2004 RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Queen Mary 2 was awarded this privileged title and continues to celebrate this golden heritage.
Queen Mary 2’s kennel programme is available on all crossings between New York and Southampton in either direction, and is overseen by a full-time Kennel Master who takes care of responsibilities such as feeding, walking and cleaning the ship’s 12 spacious kennels. Travelling dogs and cats also receive a complimentary gift pack and other animal amenities.The kennels and adjacent indoor and outdoor walking areas are open throughout the day, enabling passengers to spend significant time with their pet. Reservations for the kennels may be made at time of booking, and are based on space availability. Contact Cunard for fees and additional requirements.

Paying a Premium Not to Mingle at Sea - New York Times

2007-11-14T18:53:00.000-05:00

Paying a Premium Not to Mingle at Sea - New York Times: "Over the past few years, Norwegian Cruise Line has been rolling out a new category of luxury cabins called Garden and Courtyard Villas that offer a private-access pool, sun deck, steam room and gym. A few of these rooms, billed as a “ship within a ship,” have their own hot tubs and garden terraces. Guests can even order room service from any restaurant onboard and stay holed up in their own little enclave, away from hoi polloi, if they so choose.

And Cunard, which operates the Queen Mary 2, is taking the class divisions further. The ship’s top dining rooms are already reserved for guests in the so-called Queens and Princess Grill Suites. For its latest vessel, the Queen Victoria, scheduled to debut in December, guests staying in those top suites will get their own elevator to take them to dinner, so they won’t have to rub elbows with the underclasses."

One Last Columbia Studio Brief

2007-11-07T11:09:00.000-05:00

One last Columbia studio brief:

Ed Keller

'WORLD GAMES' for a GENERAL ECONOMY of Information and Energy

In the broadest sense, our studio program will be to design an infrastructure, a game, buildings, or even a city within an inclusive general economy that we describe in this brief. We will look to the way that energy & information are stored in the landscapes of the world- cities, highways, airports, deserts- and attempt to inflect the paths they flow along.

Dynamic systems in relation to each other condition not only the basics of interaction in the world, but also the very structure of time itself. The project of architecture, of design- is by its very nature, the construction of 'time machines'.

'"information and form always appear in association with historic development. In a world already endowed with a certain structure, any interaction between matter and energy- which signifies increased entropy- alters the structure and makes future changes more predictable..." In urban development, or in a building's construction, every decision- tracing a roadway, situating a facility, distributing a floor plan- conditions subsequent building episodes, rendering them more predictable; the energy necessary to materialize each of these decisions is accumulated in physical structures that on the one hand condition future construction, and on the other hand can be used to interpret past construction. The energy stored in construction- both in the materials themselves and in the significant order in which they find themselves as a result of transport and installation- is therefore projected toward the future, which it helps form, and toward the past, which it interprets.'
Fire and Memory, Fernadez-Galiano pp. 63/64

We will use this idea of energy, information, form, and time in the studio to develop a program in relation to contemporary problems of infrastructure and territory. We will add to it the model of general economy offered by Georges Bataille in his volumes The Accursed Share, and we will place Bataille's thinking against the 'World Game' concept proposed by Bucky Fuller.

'World Game is a continuing scientific research and physical prototyping development. It is devoted to progressive discovery of how most efficiently and expeditiously to employ [1] the total world-around resources, [2] total accumulated knowledge, and [3] the total already-produced technological tooling of Spaceship Earth, all three to the ever advancing equal advantage of all its present and future passengers.'
Critical Path, B. Fuller, p. 202

One of the strengths of Bataille's model in The Accursed Share is his ability to think through cultural, infrastructural and ecological energetic systems using an inclusive model. This addresses one of the basic limitations of Fuller's World Game, which emphasizes the fundamental survival of humans. I won't deny that our basic survival is indeed at stake today; however we will propose that factoring informational systems into the energy equations is necessary. One of the possible weaknesses of Bataille's model is an insistence on the unavoidable expenditure of energy. Whether this is seen as a waste, or a use of the energy for previously incomprehensible gains- c.f. potlatch, which Bataille cites, for example- will be one of the themes the studio tests.

'On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess; the question is always posed in terms of extravagance. The choice is limited to how the wealth is to be squandered... Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe...living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it... real excess does not begin until the growth of the individual or group has reached its limits.'
The Accursed Share, Bataille, pp23-29

We will ask how architecture and urbanism can participate in a game within a general economy and general system of the world. What possible futures can be accessed by the time machines we develop?

We will visit several case study locations on our Kinne trip, which will include airports, highways around LA, the city of LA, and the Owens Gorge and Salton Sea desert areas near LA. In our visit to the Owens Gorge area, we will be guided by Matt Coolidge, working with CLUI [The Center for Land Use Interpretation], based out of LA. We will also visit their LA headquarters.

SPEED, TERRITORY, COMMUNICATION
Considering the project of architecture within this model of a general economy suggests the need for a wider net which can compass the 'invisible conspiracies' that theorists like Jameson have suggested we live surrounded by, in today’s unescapably geopolitical world.

The factors of mediation and migration described by Appadurai in his Modernity at Large parallel ideas that Foucault unpacked some 40 years ago, when he called the great variables of the post-modern and post-industrial world 'speed, territory, and communication'. These domains are not inherently part of the previous paradigm's vision of what an architect manages in their practice; however, one could argue that our current paradigm, shifts in technology, the sciences, global culture, politics and communication are indeed all vectors for a redefinition of what an architect or urban designer does, and in fact all those disciplines partake in the realms of mediation and migration- in the realms of 'speed, territory, and communication'.

The territories that architecture can establish- not just lines on the ground, or geometric composition, but networked energetic and material flows- the new speeds by which urban programs emerge, evolve, and propagate worldwide through social practices that are not part of buildings, but are nonetheless inseparable from space as a practice- the communications systems which are increasingly part of architecture- not in a semiotic process but in the ways that the construction of buildings increasingly offers the opportunity of construction within an intelligent system of manufacturing, financing, and use; these are all reasons why architecture as it has largely been practiced must undergo a paradigm shift on the practical and conceptual levels if it is to maintain or increase is value.

MEDIATION and MIGRATION
Appadurai's terms mediation and migration can impact design thinking on a very practical level. Much as Foucault changed the way we understand the work of language itself, in his text Archaeology of Knowledge, which redirected our attention away from a search from meaning, toward a search for the AFFECT of assemblies of words and concepts- similarly we have to consider the affect of mediation in today's world. This affect has little to do with the meaning or semiotic of architecture and space, and much more to do with the ways that space mobilizes ideologies, economies, cultures, and subjectivities. In this mode of thinking, it is irrelevant to argue about the meaning of a building, a facade, an urban space, a technology. The primary question leaps up in scale to ask how the design works, where it is relevant, what it moves. Affect addresses this issue.

Affect mediation is linked to MIGRATION. Migration of cultures, ideas, economies, information and energy. But also, migration of biomass and power. The biopower issue as engaged by thinkers like Foucault, Negri and Hardt, et.al., is key here, and today's architecture needs to address this fully.

Cities can inflect the massive flows of human bodies- by some accounts, in China alone hundreds of millions in the floating population, and worldwide some billions squatting on land they do not own- with entire nations depending on these 'illegal immigrants' to power economies, industry, agriculture. If cities can acknowledge, integrate, and inflect these masses, then they will be participating in an unprecedented manner.

PROGRAM , SITES

The site for this studio will be a generic, extended global landscape of migratory
infrastructures, highlighting the contrast from the open energy fields of the desert,
through the channels of the highway and the airport, to the energetic reservoirs of the city.

Although a general range of sites is given- Deserts, Highways, Cities, Airports- this site is extremely open. This studio will ask the students to formulate a thesis in response to the challenges offered by the studio brief. Students will develop their own programs and choose specific locations in the global 'site' to design their projects. It is suggested that the design solution is positioned approximately ten years in the future.

Our travel will take us to several locations on our Kinne trip to do case studies in Los Angeles, several airports in transit and in LA, the highways we can study around LA, and the Desert south and east of LA: the Salton Sea and Owens Valley areas. We'll pass infrastructural and energy accumulation sites: the Windfarms near Palm Springs, the many power plants, irrigation networks and infrastructures outside of LA.

There will also be an optional hop to Seattle to investigate further airport infrastructures, and the recently completed Seattle Library.

PROCESS

Methodologically, we will begin with an analysis process and develop a predictive model .
This will involve the conversion of data from dynamic, analytical models which simulate
systems behaviors, into a set of rules for designing architecture, infrastructure, and urban space. This process also will demand the conversion of these models into a set of rules for
playing the game. In this world game, the dynamic models should tell us something about the flow of energy and information through that world system.

REQUIRED READING [excerpts]
Fire and Memory: Fernandez-Galiano
Taking Measures Across the American Landscape: Corner & Maclean
Crying of Lot 49: Pynchon
Critical Path: B. Fuller
UBIK: Philip K. Dick
The Accursed Share: G. Bataille
City of Quartz, Dead Cities: Davis
Empire + Multitude: Hardt and Negri
A Thousand Years of NonLinear History: M. DeLanda
Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: R. Thom
Geopolitical Aesthetic: F. Jameson
Diamond Age: N. Stephenson

REQUIRED SCREENINGS
Koyanisquatsi: Reggio
Lessons of Darkness: Herzog
Once Upon a Time in the West: Leone
Mamma Roma: Pasolini
Chinatown: Polanski
Easy Rider: Hopper
Beau Travail: Denis
Playtime: Tati
Crash: Cronenberg
Lost Highway: Lynch
Paris, Texas: Wenders
Man With a Movie Camera: Vertov
Passenger, Zabriskie, Point, Red Desert: Antonioni
Repo Man: Cox
Until the End of the World: Wenders
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Gilliam
Polygraph: LePage

ADDITIONAL READING
Shockwave Rider: J. Brunner
Electronic Disturbance, other texts: Critical Art Ensemble
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Thompson
Organizational Space: Keller Easterling
Tomorrow Now: Bruce Sterling
Anabasis: St Jean Perse
The Invisibles: Grant Morrison
Transmetropolitan: Warren Ellis
Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus
Out of Control: Kevin Kelly
Smart Mobs: Howard Rheingold
Modernity at Large: Arjun Appadurai
Double Game: Sophie Calle
TechGnosis: Erik Davis
Watchmen: Alan Moore
A Thousand Plateaus: Gilles Deleuze + Felix Guattari

Peabody Air Slideshow

2007-11-07T02:09:00.000-05:00

This is Peabody Air. A brief photo-documentary looking at air and its infrastructure in a Peabody Terrace apartment (mine). Almost identical to the one on the left:

I am attempting to bring together:
1) Modernism
2) State of Exception (?)
3) Peabody Terrace
4) Infrastructure
5) Air
6) Google
7) Tactics

Ambitious? I think not.
Let the images do the talking (composition does matter):

Yosemite Grid

2007-11-06T00:27:00.001-05:00

BLDGBLOG: The bridged architecture of adjacent peaks and "the fallen man of letters"

2007-11-03T23:21:00.000-04:00

BLDGBLOG: The bridged architecture of adjacent peaks and "the fallen man of letters":

"Awesomely, sci fi author and war correspondent H.G. Wells even did some reporting on the matter. For The New York Times, back in 1916, Wells wrote:

Mountain surfaces are extraordinarily various and subtle. You may understand Picardy upon a map, but mountain warfare is three-dimensional. A struggle may go on for weeks or months consisting of apparently separate and incidental skirmishes, and then suddenly a whole valley organization may crumble away in retreat or disaster.

Describing the Italy-Austrian mountain war as 'among the strangest and most picturesque [battlefields] in all this tremendous world conflict' –

– in fact, he adds, the "fighting in the Dolomites has been perhaps the most wonderful of all these mountain campaigns" – Wells goes on:

automobile of the war tourist

One more long quotation – come on, how many of you knew that H.G. Wells was also a war correspondent? – because his descriptions of these mountain landscapes are just great:

The aspect of these mountains is particularly grim and wicked; they are worn old mountains, they tower overhead in enormous vertical cliffs of sallow gray, with the square jointings and occasional clefts and gullies, their summits are toothed and jagged; the path ascends and passes around the side of the mountain upon loose screes, which descend steeply to a lower wall of precipices. In the distance rise other harsh and desolate-looking mountain masses, with shining occasional scars of old snow. Far below is a bleak valley of stunted pine trees, through which passes the road of the Dolomites.In any case, it's the idea of the Alps being riddled with manmade caves and passages, with bunkers and tunnels, bristling with military architecture, even self-connected peak to peak by fortified bridges, the Great Moutain Wall of Northern Italy, architecture literally become mountainous, piled higher and higher upon itself forming new artificial peaks looking down on the fields and cities of Europe, that just fascinates me – not to mention the idea that you could travel up, and thus go futher into history, discovering that the past has been buried above you, the geography of time topologically inverted. "

Burying the Past | Metropolis Magazine | November 2002

2007-11-03T23:07:00.000-04:00

Burying the Past | Metropolis Magazine | November 2002:

"Since October 2001 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has thrown out nearly 50 percent of its examiner collections of patents dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Three things are being lost: a filing system, a specialized drafting technique, and a historical record of invention. And the history of an entire design medium is being destroyed."

"The patent examiner's former classification system contained almost 500 classes of technology, each with hundreds of subdivisions. It allowed researchers to easily learn the history of a patent and compare it to other similar designs. "Seldom does an invention come along that is as out of the blue as the first lightbulb, or electric motor, or laser," Rabin says. "Most are incremental improvements that fit in or between other similar patents. Being able to quickly span a decade or so of similar work in a matter of an hour provides an inventor a context and history he can't find anywhere else, and usually results in a better invention."

Unfortunately the computer system that will replace the paper library functions much the way a search engine does on the Web. Rabin explains, "You fish around with some selected words and hope the patent you are seeking (the one that may mean trouble for your invention) has the same words that you have chosen to look for it." If a match doesn't come up, a researcher is out of luck.

Three-quarters of the patents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century contained beautifully lithographed drawings made by artisans that specialized in patent drafting; now their work is vanishing from public view forever. Beyond the delicate line quality and light and shade on display in, for example, Edison's 1893 patent for the Electric Locomotive (a recycling bin find), some of the patents, like R. S. Kibler's Continuously Variable Transmission, from 1936, were meticulously colored. The USPTO keeps a complete set of pristine patent drawings in the very same Iron Mountain facility as Corbis's collections. But the patent examiner's collection was a working one. Generations of examiners have added notes, new findings, and thoughts to the patent sheets, often in handwriting that can be dated by the style of its scrawl. This enabled each new examiner to see what his past colleagues thought of the invention, providing an invaluable picture of patent history. The black-and-white low-resolution scans available online at www.uspto.gov omit not only those notes (now lost forever) but the sheer beauty of the line quality, color, depth, and shade of the drawings.

"To save everything would," Rabin says glumly, "take a K-Mart"--about 75,000 square feet--to house the 6.5 million patents, which average 16 pages each. But he is doing his part via www.edisonsark.org, a Web site that includes color scans of the patents he has found, thus at least preserving the documents as they should be seen. For Rabin "the dilemma is how to preserve these patents and show what's being lost."

Iron Mountain

Freenet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2007-11-03T22:54:00.000-04:00

Freenet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Freenet's founders argue that only with true anonymity comes true freedom of speech, and that what they view as the beneficial uses of Freenet outweigh its negative uses. Their assumption is that free speech is more important than nearly any other consideration and Freenet attempts to remove the possibility of any group imposing their beliefs or values on any other. Although many states censor communications to different extents, they all share one commonality in that a body must decide what information to censor and what information to allow. What may be acceptable to one group of people may be considered offensive or even dangerous to another. In essence, the purpose of Freenet is that nobody is allowed to decide what is acceptable. Tolerance for each others' values is encouraged and failing that, the user is asked to turn a blind eye to content which opposes his or her views. One analysis of Freenet files conducted in the year 2000 claimed that the top 3 types of files contained in Freenet were text (37%), audio (21%), and images (14%). 59% of all the text files were drug-related, 71% of all audio files were rock music, and 89% of all images were pornographic.[1] Due to the nature of Freenet, a typical user may unknowingly host this sort of information, which may hypothetically make them subject to severe civil and criminal penalties. Freenet attempts to prevent this through "plausible deniability", preventing the user from knowing what's on his or her own node and making it difficult to determine if a piece of information is in any given node without causing the distribution of that piece of information throughout the network to change in the process. No court cases have tested any of this to date.

Reports of Freenet's use in authoritarian nations is difficult to track due to the very nature of Freenet's goals. One group, Freenet-China, has translated the Freenet software to Chinese and is distributing it within China on CD and floppy disk."

NPR : A Los Angeles 'Hotel' for Internet Carriers

2007-11-03T22:51:00.001-04:00

NPR : A Los Angeles 'Hotel' for Internet Carriers: "And like the guests in a regular hotel, these networks can get to know each other. So if one telecom company needed to link up with another, it's much easier when they're under the same roof. That can be particularly helpful in the event of a disaster like the December 2006 earthquake that struck Taiwan, severing critical undersea fiber optic cables. Most voice and data traffic into and out of Taiwan was slowed or halted, and connectivity to and from other Asian countries was drastically reduced. Getting to the bottom of the ocean and repairing the cables has taken months. But places such as One Wilshire were able to re-route some of that Internet and voice traffic through their facility within days. Some observers says the role carrier hotels play in the Internet's ability to cope with disasters, could make them an attractive target for terrorists. Could 'carrier hotels' like One Wilshire be targeted because of their importance in global communications? And what if an earthquake or other natural disaster hit Los Angeles, disabling this critical site?"

HavenCo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2007-11-03T22:51:00.000-04:00

HavenCo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "HavenCo Limited is a data hosting services company founded in 2000 which operates from Sealand, an unrecognised self-declared 'sovereign principality' that occupies a man-made former World War II defensive facility originally known as Roughs Tower located approximately six miles from the coast of Suffolk, southeast England."

Hans Hollein

2007-11-03T20:18:00.000-04:00

is crazy.

BLDGBLOG

2007-11-03T02:48:00.000-04:00

BLDGBLOG: "Surely someone with loads of money could finally do something interesting, for instance, putting aside the cocaine addiction and the personal fleets of Range Rovers and the Malibu mansions and buying land, buying lots of land, buying as many tens of thousands of acres as they can afford – and not developing it, not re-selling it, not clear-cutting it, not even necessarily preserving it, just doing something out there in their own private wilderness, whether it's opening a system of public trails – or maybe you can subscribe to the land the way you subscribe to a magazine, and so you get access to new trails every few months – or building radio astronomical research stations, or a summer camp for landscape journalists, or the BLDGBLOG Academy, or a human clone farm, or whatever. Build a private cave. Who cares. But, surely, with literally tens of millions of acres of land at stake here, and with more and more – and more – people becoming billionaires, let alone millionaires, someone with a little imagination will come along finally and do something interesting out there, away from the airports, alone in the darkness of North America, surrounded by maple trees, coming up with plans, changing history, supplying novelists with fodder for plots for decades to come. Otherwise we'll just build more houses."

The Return of Superfly

2007-11-03T02:09:00.000-04:00

The Return of Superfly: "A couple of days later, eating at a T.G.I. Friday's, Lucas scowled through glareproof glass to the suburban strip beyond. 'Look at this shit,' he said. A giant Home Depot down the road especially bugged him. Bumpy Johnson himself couldn't have collected protection from a damn Home Depot, he said with disgust. 'What would Bumpy do? Go in and ask to see the assistant manager? Place is so big, you get lost past the bathroom sinks. But that's the way it is now. You can't find the heart of anything to stick the knife into.'"

Google Urbanism 1.0 - Proposition

2007-11-01T17:31:00.000-04:00

So, the last few days have not been particularly productive on the speculation side; ruminating on Peabody Intervention has not produced much by way of fruitful architectural thought. As far as researching goes, I have had many more thoughts and frustrations and revelations, but I am still convinced (as was discussed last Friday) that some immediate, rapid, productive speculation is in order. Otherwise a downward spiral will begin shortly, and this will want to turn into a (bad) research paper. So, though I should have initiated this yesterday, I am now proposing an exercise in speculation. The bulk of it will be done before the weekend, and it will be analyzed and formatted over the weekend. The point is to make a proposal (which I am totally not sure of) and begin outlining an attack to it, which will hopefully allow me to bring in and frame the myriad of disparate thoughts and strands and blah blah blah.

In the spirit of the Daily Radical Proposal (yesterday's and today's of which this will count for),
I present:

GOOGLE URBANISM 1.0

THE SCENARIO

The 700 MHz broadcast TV spectrum goes up for grabs early next year (Jan?). This is true.

What this means: the portion of the spectrum (2-51?) that was formerly reserved for the broadcast of analog television signals is available as TV stations were forced (asked?) to switch over to digital broadcasting by a certain date (2009?).

Google submitted a letter to the FCC stating that if 4 conditions of "openness" were imposed on the winner of the auction, they would submit a minimum open bid of 4.6 billion $ (what is this relative to current market value). More on this later, but it is basically a 'classical' economic response to a 'duopoly' that is being proposed, with all the attendant baggage. Plus Google wants in, obviously.

Perhaps a combo of cheap devices and free service based on an ad-centric model akin to that of their search engine is in store for nation-wide free wireless access, through any device, but especially a Google phone.

The other companies, cable TV and phones are pissed, AT&T the least (because they don't own the last mile to your home).

Good/Cool Things:

- It sounds so spatially evocative (think hydropower a little):

"At issue is a swath of spectrum in the 700 megahertz band"

"breaks up the 700 megahertz band into a five blocks of spectrum and requires the owners of a large, 22-MHz upper "C Block" to provide a platform that is more open to devices and applications."

"The FCC will soon auction off access to that spectrum, which is considered highly valuable because of its far-reaching strengths."
"leveled the playing field for companies that want to get into the network business but cannot break through the defenses erected by the massive incumbents who dominate the industry,"

- It's about networks

- Google is intense

- the internet, wireless communications, airwaves and the attendant metaphors are interesting: software v hardware, hacking, open source, open source community, docs, earth etc, massive multiplayer online universes, crazy networked physical infrastructure vs wireless infrastructure with mobile devices

- there is plenty of intense physical stuff to deal with

- Google has issues with censoring in China, is beginning to deal with global geographic issues

- maybe there is a wacky crossover between spectrums, comm waves and physical pollution as different emanations of the same stuff

- the whole ideas of communities (chat, email group, site, social progs, multiplayer lives and games) and forms of web-bing (blog, email, browsing, apps, storage, sharing, and so on) would seem exciting and spatial and you know

- s.o.e. is allover this

- this list goes on, and could get organized, but it all leads to

THE PROPOSITION

hmmm...its coming.

Small business - Patent Law - Prior Art Search and Existing Patents - USPTO Stopfakes.gov

2007-11-01T00:40:00.000-04:00

Small business - Patent Law - Prior Art Search and Existing Patents - USPTO Stopfakes.gov: "The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) strongly recommends that all prospective applicants retain the services of a registered patent attorney or patent agent to prepare and prosecute their applications. The preparation of an application for patent and the conducting of the proceedings in the United States Patent and Trademark Office to obtain the patent is an undertaking requiring the knowledge of patent law and rules and USPTO practice and procedures, as well as knowledge of the scientific or technical matters involved in the particular invention."

Thoughts and Columbia

2007-10-30T17:19:00.001-04:00

Once again proving that it's all been done before, I sampled recent Columbia studio briefs and found outcroppings of my thesis interests under the surface everywhere. Or I'm just reading in to things. Either way, innovation is lame, so lets just consider this a confirmation of intelligence and a commitment to mastery. Perhaps excerpting some snippets will help me situate myself against alternate theses.

One big divide that seems lurking under the surface (if I may paraphrase and exaggerate a little, these things are probably mostly coming from my head anyway), is the split between:

(1) Briefs that put architecture in service of a de Certeau-like agenda of expanding room for free play within the product world of capitalism. The exercising of biopower as a tactical political move. This idea exacerbates the feelings of frustration I encountered on reading a chunk of de Certeau last night. While I think his conception of the world is elegant, captivating, and most importantly evidencing truth, or at least the image of it along with correctness, his conclusion that tactics must take the form of play seemed deadening, at least for architecture.
It seems like we are either on the side of the generic system (the side of production, the man), or we are forced to minimize our role in the interesting (at least per de Certeau) side of consumption, to disappear, leaving everyman as his own, kinda lame, spatial manipulator.
So, in order for this to work in such a way that interests me, the architect would need to increase agency such that, first, we actually increase the room for play, and second, we actually improve, expand, alter the definition of play to increase its potential effects. We make the biopower stronger and better. So architects could either (1) design the tactics of de Certeau's politics (designing them might already be a contradiction), (2) or they could willingly provide an infrastructure (his iambic pentameter analogy) that increases constraint to encourage creativity (but then aren't we still on the production/man side), (3) or they could open up intentional holes in something that doesn't at first seem like infrastructure, or even within existing infrastructures, which allow biopower to flourish in and capitalize on, and even expand.
One would be a strategy of designing consumption itself, one of designing an infrastructure of consumption, and one of producing holes for consumption (through parasitic, corruptive, deceptive, erasing, altering, hiding/revealing, making hackable etc moves within existing infrastructures (or architectures).
At first blush, the first seems somewhat tedious, with a scale too small for architecture (or maybe for me, thats what frustrated me when reading de Certeau, at least). The second seems to embody contradiction, and be somewhat pompous. The third seems the most immediately appealing. Not just because the quality of the architectural responses it seems to trigger for me sound cool, but because it also seems to actually define a role, an agency, for the architect within a given conception of the world. We are not the man, working on products. But we are also not just the people, working on our tiny zone in a sea. Rather we are a new agent that seeks to operate with the relevant techniques in favor of the people (and to some degree the man, by keeping some focus on production as well) with systems that are relevant, on the systems' own terms. This allows us to slowly encourage play, and then modify it as an appropriate architecture as it/we develop...

(2) Briefs that paint a roughly similar picture of the world, but respond not with biopower but with new network connections. They return political power and agency on a large scale, they believe it. So while some of the rhetoric in these studios sounds correct in framing a scenario, the approach, at least for now, seems less appealing to me. Still useful as oppositional framing devices.

Note: A lot of these also espouse a worldview of increasing statelessness, global-everything, and diffuse something-or-another that seems not so right. I prefer to think that these spaces are within relatively conventional definitions of the world (states, borders, etc) and rather can make a footprint through states of exception. There are weird parallel and/or overlapping conditions, but I don't think that the world is yet turning into a homogenized soup. I think. At least not at the scale I am interested in.

Ok, for fun, interesting (for better or for worse) snippets from Columbia's recent studio briefs. After writing all this the connections to below seem flimsier and less necessary, but have interesting smells and feels within little moments or ideas. The language is peppered with relevancies, which probably means either I have cast my net too wide and vague (surely a truth), or that my topic is super-awesome (also inevitable), or that my project is all-consuming in terms of its ability to materialize in my eyes, to change the forms of things (yup).
So here goes:

Reinhold Martin, Fall 2005
Governor’s Island, New York. In the spring of 2005, Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC) issued a “Request for Expressions of Interest” to develop the island.

In response, we propose that:

1. The island be renamed Utopia (an island second in fame and influence only to Manhattan), and that all subsequent development be expected to live up to that name.
2. The new island’s urbanism be one of islands—individual units of space arranged to maximize programmatic mixture—of which Guggenheim: Utopia will be the first.
3. The resulting islands within islands be designed as an escape—“Escape to the Islands.”

Guggenheim: Utopia is therefore conceived as a beautiful object whose primary function is to attract visitors and investment capital to Governors Island through the public display of art and culture.

In particular, we will take notice of—and attempt to neutralize—their shared organicism. As a backdrop for the understanding of architecture as a self-referential aesthetic object...

Enigma/Entropy

The aesthetic model we will pursue will privilege enigma over communication and entropy over order.

Utopian Realism

The overall challenge of the studio will be to explore the architectural and urban potential of an approach that can be called Utopian Realism, which asserts that:

1. The further inside (architecture) you go, the further outside (the city, the world) you get.
2. Every building imagines a city.
3. Every building can imagine a better city, and a better world.

Laura Kurgan, Fall 2005
No such permanent institution -- with the ability to prosecute and jail individuals for crimes outside the jurisdiction of a single nation-state -- has ever existed in the history of humanity.

its spatial definition (as an institution with global reach and borderless jurisdiction. but housed in a particular place in built structures) is still being debated.

The institution can be interpreted architecturally, then, as part archive, part courthouse, part stage or broadcast studio, part research center, or as a complex hybrid of existing programs, some of which are not easily compatible, and one whose reach and public extends automatically beyond its temporal and physical location.

Your work should take into account the fact that the courtroom is always a built diagram. Do not confuse the minimal elements of the ICC courtroom's program (interpretation booth, robing chambers, etc.) with the basic diagrammatic structure of any courtroom -- it is the latter on which you should concentrate here, and hence distinguish between the diagrammatic and its programmatic aspects of the courtroom.

Consider what happens to these courtrooms-as-diagrams once inserted into the larger context of the ICC as an institution, and once the ICC is itself active in even larger contexts, i.e. networks of power, information, and ethics. As an institution (not a building), what is the ICC, what might it do or become, and what forces is or will it in turn be subjected to?

Although the building is made of a series of rooms, it is also constructed of a series of networks and remote locations, both visible and invisible, and looks backwards and forwards in history.

Scott Marble, Spring 2006
...we will consider the ubiquitous portable classroom that results from the chronic problem of fluctuating enrollment and general overcrowding of public schools. While they are always intended to be deployed temporarily as an interim solution to space needs, portable classrooms are very often used for many years becoming part of the permanent landscape of public schools. And while they are universally seen as architecturally inadequate and symbolically negative, they continue to expand in use.

Marc Tsurumaki, Spring 2006
At once a space of regimentation and control, the hotel is conversely a site of pleasure, play and social experimentation. In this sense, the hotel approaches an architecture of ludic excess, a technical and bureaucratic apparatus whose primary function is diversion. A provocative assemblage of itineraries, functions and performances, it offers an incubator for emergent forms of collective experience and new techno-social assemblages. Viewed opportunistically, the paradoxical mix of efficiency and excess provides a rich ground for intervention, revealing the complimentary relation between play and order, between the productive and the transgressive, between the conventional and the radically inventive.

Fred Levrat, Spring 2006
Geopolitical investment and brilliant marketing has allowed the small city of Dubai to recently become one of the major metropolitan players in the world. Fantasy and marketing has become a way to attract capital, generating a city not based on “demand” or “necessity” (there is absolutely no local population need) but on the satisfaction of the materialization of a “virtual environment.”

In Rem Koolhaas retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan “Delirious New York” the main reference for the iconography and driving force for the constitution of Manhattan is fuelled by the fantasy of Coney Island and the concept of New York as an attractor of new population and capital. If the Chrysler Building or the Empire State building are to be labeled as subconscious association to the Coney Island land of pleasure, one has to recognize the entirely conscious and meticulous planning of operations such as the Palm, the World or the Burj Dubai.

The double physical condition of the tabula rasa, on the desert sand and on the water has been quite helpful for this construction of dreams. The other tabula rasa is happening socially, where international capital and an imported “slave” labor allows almost any materialization.

Arab investors are not anymore interested to invest in the US stock market, and are looking for an outlet to develop their own “progressive” environment.

The role of the architect is not just to solve problems but to invent new environments. To constitute a package of virtual materialization – with the name, the design, the product, the materials, etc. Even invent the type of user that should use it. Not at an object level but on an environment level, on a neighborhood level…

Leslie Gill and Tina Manis, Spring 2006
the first studio focused on the formation of the Department of Homeland Security and the housing of its workforce in a regional outpost in the American Southwest. The following semesters examined a federally mandated agenda to increase security in the form of sanctioned programs to build barricades along the border. This year, we extend our focus to examine the role of the American Embassy in Mexico City and/or the role of a Mexican Office of Consulate Affairs in San Diego; both programs have historically represented two scales of the domestic and international identity at home and abroad.

The State Department’s mission for embassies is clear, yet the identity and presence of the embassy remains in a state of flux becoming increasingly a fortress of secrecy rather than that of a house of entertainment. The world’s perception of the US Embassy extends the country’s image abroad and is at once a symbol of American vulnerability and one of arrogance and excess.

Conversely, the role of the consulate is less directly tied to national identity and politics. Its smaller scale and flexible mandate provide for a nimble, bottom-up, organizational structure. As a result the consulate has been less architecturally emblematic, more accessible, and better integrated into the local environment. Ultimately its obscured status is more accessible than its larger sibling.

Ed Keller and Moji Baratloo, Spring 2006
Control of water, protocols for its treatment and distribution, and an evaluation of the overall influence on urban morphology will be a key factor for socio-political formations over the coming decades. The impact of these factors on urban use patterns, as well as developing architectural, urban and political morphologies will be the focus of this studio.

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, one thing is clear: a general economy and scarce natural resources ever more powerfully dominate global relations, and this economy subsumes all political, passional, and imaginative systems. A set of constraints with water, energy and resource management as their prime concern dominates global discourse, which still relies on the residual artifacts of an old school geopolitic, one that represents nation states are the primary arbiter for both global, political and personal agency. As global citizens we are facing a potential crisis of unprecedented dimensions, but also the opportunity for rapid response, growth and change at a pace never before possible.

recent actions by individual cities to adopt the Kyoto Protocol independent of their host nation’s actions on Kyoto point to a new kind of global association emerging that dissolves previous fixed relations and repositions cities as networked mini-states with global agency. [eg. the dozens of US cities connected through ‘Local Governments for Sustainability’.]

will investigate this new relationship between water, networks, and bio-power management and suggest emergent social, political, and economic bodies that can affiliate literally overnight, thus developing new tactics for program invention, landscape control, and indeed resource use.

By engaging in this project, we imply that the new, global, networked city is more than just a disintermediated cultural field that individuals can coopt for new forms of ‘play’, but indeed offers unprecedented opportunities - if cities such as Brisbane and the Gold Coast in Australia can prepare- to channel water and resource use such that they become real organs for social and political equity.

TECHNE- Tectonic and Organizational
The New York Waterfront: ed. Kevin Bone
City of Quartz, Dead Cities: Davis
Organizational Space: Easterling
Critical Path, B. Fuller
Once Upon a Time in the West : Leone Manhatta : Sheeler + Strand

CONCEPT
Means Without End: Giorgio Agamben
Geopolitical Aesthetic: Jameson
Practice of Everyday Life: deCerteau
The Accursed Share: Bataille
Fire and Memory: Fernandez-Galiano
A Thousand Plateaus: Gilles Deleuze + Felix Guattari

Psychogeographies of Water and Landscape
Taking Measures Across the American Landscape: Corner + MacLean
Crying of Lot 49: Pynchon
Red Desert: Antonioni The Return : Zvyagintsev
The Kingdom, Element of Crime: Lars von Trier Repo Man : Alex Cox
Delicatessen, City of Lost Children : Caro + Jeunet Fitzcarraldo : Herzog
Mulholland Drive: Lynch Beau Travail : Denis
Stalker: Tarkovsky The Last Wave : Weir
Apocalypse Now : Coppola Bright Future: Kurosawa

Systems Behavior, Material Controls
1000 Years of Non Linear History: Manuel DeLanda
Emergence: Johnson
Hypersea: McMenamin and McMenamin
Smart Mobs: Howard Rheingold
Empire, Multitude: Hardt and Negri
Cymatics, Hans Jenny
Syriana: Gaghan Lessons of Darkness: Herzog
Chinatown: Polanski Videodrome, Crash: Cronenberg
Heat: Mann

Scenarios: Past, Present and Future
Modernity at Large: Arjun Appadurai
Electronic Disturbance, other texts: Critical Art Ensemble
Diamond Age: N. Stephenson
UBIK: Philip K. Dick
Transmetropolitan: Warren Ellis
Shockwave Rider: J. Brunner
Dune : Frank Herbert
Koyanisquatsi : Reggio Playtime : Tati
Apu Trilogy : Satyajit Ray The Day After Tomorrow : Emmerich

Jeffrey Inaba, Spring 2006
The term 'Bubble City' is used to describe the explosive development of urban areas throughout the world that we have experienced in the past three decades. Bubble cities have been of interest to planners and architects for revealing new professional conditions they must or will soon encounter, such as accelerated economic investment and divestment, fast-track planning, and 'instant' construction processes (e.g., Tokyo, Houston, Barcelona, Berlin, "Holland," Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Dubai, Mumbai, etc.).

or every contemporary city that is hot, now there are several that are not. This studio explored the conceptual situation bubble cities face after the apex of rapid growth. With the growing number of major world cities that have recently hit a plateau, it is possible to examine the efforts of these bubble cities to re-bound in ways that previous cities have not, fueled in part by the not-so-distant experience of irrational prosperity.

The studio used Hong Kong as a case study. Students proposed new directions in light of its 1990s growth, its reunification with China, the 'Asian Economic Crisis,' and SARs. The 'One Country, Two Systems' mantra has effectively shifted from a policy to use Hong Kong as a laboratory to 'learn' from the market economy, to one largely limiting Hong Kong's economic power, expertise, and infrastructure. Hong Kong is an example of a major world city that must invent its future where the advantages of location and advanced infrastructure have been minimized.

HERE'S ONE BIG POOPER, I ALMOST DON'T WANT TO WRITE IT. Its really just the term, the rest seems undeveloped, even malformed. But still.
Ed Keller and Douglas Diaz, Summer
Historically unprecedented relationships emerge today as the centuries-old idea of a 'state of exception' finds increasingly networked channels of operation. The contemporary boundaries of global institutions create utterly new forms of territory, and these require a different range of urban and architectural solutions.

Today an emerging space of freedom and agency may have a chance to install the sociopolitical intensities envisioned by Constant in his New Babylon schemes; fully activated and responsive to Bataille's general economy, for better or worse: catalyzing unexpected transitive relationships in the world system of politics, culture, capital, energy, and information.

The studio began with a four-week project, analyzing precedent models of insurrections (historical or imaginary). A range of filmsâ"Battle of Algiers, Code 46, Passenger, etc.â"were screened and discussed to provide a theoretical framework for the design process. After the mid-review, the studio divided into two general camps: either anti- or pro-insurrection.

Projects operated at multiple scales and questioned how they might promote notions of control or freedom at the level of the city, crowd, or individual, through landscape, media, urban design, and architectural intervention. As the nation-state fades as a meaningful construct, the tectonic plates of sociopolitical drift govern all systems, behaviors and interactions. The studio tactically intervened within this geopolitical system to test the limits of architecture.

Ok, tomorrow I will go through last year, but frankly it is not getting that much more helpful. Writing that paragraph at the top was much more helpful.

Today's Radical Proposal

2007-10-30T01:34:00.001-04:00

Today's Radical Proposal (after digesting the revelatory introduction of de Certeau's "The Practice of Everyday Life" (which I am only beginning, for now, to scan, appropriate and assimilate (good words)), which also happens to further frame Peabody Intervention as an observation test case: The thesis prep document becomes a tactical manual for resistance for the Allston community in the face of Harvard's expansion, a tactical assemblage for "renting" and therefore exerting political control over its geographic (maybe no longer legally...) space, and The Thesis becomes either the exercising of these tactics in a war-game mock scenario to create seeds/holdouts, or better (maybe) the provision of the infrastructure for such operations to utilize ("a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries, a set of rules with which improvisation plays") as a complement to the manual, or maybe better even the deployment of a parasitic architecture that leeches off the existing architecture/infrastructure to improve the conditions to nourish such new modes of consumption.

Web Giants Angle for Spectrum

2007-10-29T09:10:00.000-04:00

Web Giants Angle for Spectrum: "Google and company wants to tap what they call the 'white spaces' of unused spectrum within the frequencies of TV channels 2-51 that the Federal Communications Commission has set aside for traditional broadcasters once the digital switch-over is complete in February 2009. Google and company then would transmit to a plethora of devices."

Internet Black Holes

2007-10-27T11:24:00.000-04:00

(Also from AB) States of Exception on the Internet:

Junkstate of Exception

2007-10-27T11:20:00.000-04:00

Junkstate of Exception:
AB forwarded me this quote from Junkspace:

"Entire miniature states now adopt Junskspace as political program, establish regimes of engineered disorientation, instigate a politics of systematic disarray. . . . the secret of Junkspace is that it is both promiscuous and repressive: as the formless proliferates, the formal withers, and with it all rules, regulations, recourse…"

Unique US home with Cold War Ambiance

2007-10-27T01:43:00.000-04:00

Unique US home with Cold War ambiance

BBC News

For those of us who remember the destruction of the Berlin Wall more clearly than the Cold War that preceded it, it is a chilling lesson in just how real the fear of nuclear annihilation was.

The Cold War warriors did not do things by halves. These Titan 1 missile bases took two-and-a-half years to build and were the most extensive, complex and costly ever constructed by the US Air Force that ran them.

...

Built to withstand a nuclear blast as close as 1,000m away, every room was either mounted on springs or a cushioned floor to protect from vibration.

In the domed control room, there are still springs on the ceiling, from which the early computer equipment was once suspended.

Vast black tanks loom in side chambers. They held diesel fuel for the generators and drinking water for the staff of about 25 who lived underground for days at a time.

They would have been sealed in for weeks after a nuclear attack. The round surface air vents in the ceilings could be snapped shut at the flick of a switch. The escape tubes, sealed at the bottom by heavy iron lids, were filled with tons of gravel to slow the progress of any invasion force.

The atmosphere is cool down there, regardless of the temperature on the surface. The drab green and cream paint is peeling in places; pipes and vents snake everywhere.

...

It never came. But the last base commander, Colonel Clyde D Owen, told me they were constantly aware of just how much destructive power they had.

He said he would never forget the first time he was brought through the tunnels to see a giant Titan missile in its silo, describing it as "an awesome sight".

...

Eventually, hundreds more silos would be built, scattered across America's quiet backwaters.

...

Some of these underground warrens are now owned by water companies and storage firms. Others have been turned into homes.

Of the rest, many were abandoned with their silo doors open and have slowly filled with water, prompting illegal night-time visits by extreme scuba divers.

Bari Hotchkiss, who is selling Larson Site A on internet auction site eBay, says he has been approached by a company interested in turning one of the 160-foot missile silos into an artificial reef.

An entrepreneur and amateur historian, he bought the complex on a whim in 1998. Ideally, he would like to see it turned into a children's summer camp and educational facility.

It is an admirable aim - though for the moment the base still feels haunted by the ghosts of Armageddon.

Talk about reprogramming.

Peabody Intervention - Inspirational Source Material (Tactical Situational Awarerness)

2007-10-27T00:07:00.000-04:00

So, in the tactical spirit of my next exercise - Peabody Intervention - I am proposing that as far as "source material" goes for thinking up something, I am only allowed the first two informational things I could find quickly and spontaneously about Peabody Terrace (less than 5 minutes on Google). You go to war with the army you have. Right. Also, there are things we know we know, things we know we don't know, and things we don't know that we don't know. Thanks Donald.

I will attempt to use them as starting points. Or I will summarily dispose of them. Whichever is quicker and more effective. No mercy.

Situation Briefing
Contextual Intel

(1) Harvard Workers Respond As a Team to Peabody Terrace Emergency
see article highlights below
The first is an article concerning a fire/evacuation at Peabody Terrace in 2000. I think its most salient aspect is its indication that a series of scripted responses by agents of the surrounding networks, of which Peabody Terrace is a node, demonstrate the connectedness of the Peabody Terrace enclave to wider the University System.

A scripted event-response revealing a hidden condition of differentiation (Is it really legible? To whom?). Procedures exposing underlying rules. It momentarily highlights Peabody's extreme difference from its immediate surroundings. Its enclave-ness. A situation of unusual occurrence, responded to with pre-prepared tactical force, revealing a difference in underlying structures (legal, property, social), enabling awareness (is awareness capital, convertible to power?). I guess one real meaty question to ask would be, what if a similar electrical fire were to happen in a surrounding area? More importantly, how can I understand this architecturally. Can I?

The fire starts in architecture, because of a faulty network component within the architectural enclave. This sends a shockwave, an alert, through the networks. They send agents to respond, to protect the architecture. Ok, this is a little much I realize, but the closest analogy I can come up with is the the electrical fire was 'probing the defenses' of the enclave. Forcing it to reveal its tactical significance through momentarily leveraging its strategic value in order to protect it. In exploiting its state of exception status, it is also revealing it.

The following image comes peripherally to mind, which would seem to somewhat illustrate this concept through analogy in a purely visual manner, by deploying a representational device - the cut section axo. It is from an article on the TVA by William Jordy (recommended by TH). It harks to the seam between a surrounding context and a deployed infrastructural enclave that seemed interesting from my previous looks at/readings about the TVA. In this case, it illustrates the complexities of the boundary between nature and machine.

In the case of Peabody Terrace, the architecture is dependent on its state of exception status in order to maintain its function. It must be Harvard to survive. Scale matters, and this complex is a product of subtle connections with a much broader, more powerful and multiple context, without which it could not survive, function, be inhabited.

However, in order for it to function fully as Sert intended, the boundaries between it and its context must also be minimized. It cannot broadcast its status as an enclave, its edges are blurred and porous, paths are sutured within its fabric. A delicate balance is maintained. Complaints about Peabody Terrace don't seem to focus on its functional/spatial difference from its surroundings (problem solved?), but rather its formal/material differences. The balance might be altered significantly, for example, if the formal and material properties were more directly identifiable with the broader Harvard network (ie if Harvard was concrete modernism, or Peabody was pomo colonial funk). There are subtle reversals going on, oscillations which maintain balance.

The fire serves a similar function to the section axo of the TVA damn. It momentarily reveals the connections and problematizes the seams. Only I suppose that in the case of Peabody, the situation is further complicated by the fact that there is no formal and material continuity between the enclave and its host networks (whereas the damns are a satellite formal gesture, a node in an architectural network as well, and therefore in that case the drawing is more ideological propaganda than revelatory gesture). But there is programmatic and functional continuity to be sure. It is a mutation of the dorm/cloister type, pried open and wrought urban. There is a slip between Peabody's formal and programmatic structures. And between the structures of those and its sustaining networks. Perhaps we can exploit these slippages, reveal the connections (perhaps in an ideological complex manner, rather than a simplistic revelation or assault) beneath through a tactical activation, a probing of the defenses. Ok, that's what we are taking from this article.

The article (excerpts):
""The University has this infrastructure for support in operations like this. We didn’t have to call an outside environmental unit to help. We didn’t have to call an outside bus company," said Susan Keller, director of residential real estate for Harvard Planning and Real Estate. "Those relationships were key in making things work."

On the scene Sunday were personnel from the Harvard University Police Department and several University Operations Services units, including shuttle bus drivers, fire group and university operations center personnel, electrical engineering and utilities workers, and building operations staff. Public Affairs staff were also on hand to manage media interest in the incident.

Harvard Planning and Real Estate (HPRE), which manages Peabody Terrace for the University, took a lead role in managing the situation. HPRE had its own managers on the scene providing critical assistance to those who were evacuated and important information about the building’s physical setup.

Dining Services also pitched in, creating meals for the 300 to 400 Peabody Terrace residents who were temporarily housed at the Gordon Track. University Health Services Director David Rosenthal helped obtain medication for those whose prescription drugs were left behind. And Kathy Bray, manager of freshman dormitories for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, had extra mattresses and bedding trucked over to Gordon Track in case an overnight stay was needed.

Environmental Health and Safety personnel were also at Peabody Terrace, working side-by-side with Cambridge firefighters to test the air for carbon monoxide. University Information Services also offered help, providing cell phones to workers and residents to help keep communication lines open ."

(2) Why Don’t the Rest of Us Like the Buildings the Architects Like?
see article highlights below
The second is an article which is a speech by Robert Campbell (grumpy old man?) of which only really his descriptions of Peabody Terrace are even somewhat relevant. He gives them within the context of asking the eponymous title question. Though I guess he suggests the idea of enclave as critical as well, vis a vis utopia and modernism. Nothing surprising here, for sure. Generic background problems and information.

I think it is relatively obvious how this is just sort of appropriate critical-architectural background noise for my intervention. The correct architectural waters from which to pull my Intevention-calibur from.

The article (excerpts):

No building could have had more praise heaped upon it by the architectural community than Peabody Terrace. It’s still greatly admired by architects, including myself. But more or less everybody else did, and does, hate it.

It does have a number of qualities. First, it is porous to the neighborhood. When he designed it, Josep Lluis Sert said that he didn’t want it to be like Dunster House and the other Harvard houses, which created a barrier between the neighborhood and the Charles River. And, in fact, you can walk through Peabody Terrace. What Sert didn’t foresee is that the people
in the neighborhood would act as if they’re wearing electronic dog collars. When they step onto Harvard land, they feel uncomfortable."

Second, it’s a much denser development than anything around it, but it steps down in height to match the heights of lower buildings along the street. The towers are in the center; at the edges, Peabody Terrace comes down to the scale of the neighborhood. I don’t think it’s overwhelming. The towers are very slim.

And the whole complex is ingeniously organized. There’s a corridor only on every third floor, which means that the apartments above and below the corridor run all the way through the building, so that you can enjoy ventilation and views in both directions. And the corridors are lined with windows. They’re not the usual so-called double-loaded corridors, running in darkness down the middle of the building. The balconies double as fire escapes: Sert was particularly pleased by that because he realized that if there were a budget problem, nobody would be able to cut the balconies. The pattern of balconies, sunshades, and brightly colored, operable panels, set against the raw concrete of the walls, makes for a very rich façade in the modernist manner. Sert loved Paris and liked to talk about it as “elephants and parrots”: long grayish buildings enlivened, at street level, by the bright color accents of the shops and cafes. Peabody Terrace is inventive and fun; to me, it seems to handle the issues of scale–of putting a big building in a small place–very well. But its architectural language remains, for most people, unfamiliar and offensive.

The rads and the trads are the same. They’re much more like each other than they are different. That’s because they both seek to substitute a utopia of another time for the time we actually live in. The trads find utopia in the past; the rads find it in the future.

Avant-gardism usually rides on some new wrinkle of technology, whether it’s the speeding cars of the Italian futurists in the early twentieth century, or the public health and hygiene movement that underlay so much of early modernism. Now it’s computers.

What both the rads and the trads ignore, in their love of utopias of the past and the future, is the present. They both try to elbow aside the real world we live in and substitute a world of another era. It’s a lot easier to design a utopia than to deal with the complex reality of a present time and place. You don’t have to deal with the tension between memory and invention. You just take one or the other.

I think he got that exactly right. If you think of a teenager learning for the first time about baseball or rock music, that’s how you move into any new subject, by admiring what’s familiar and by labeling and classifying. Lewis Mumford said that what he valued in architecture is what he valued in life itself: “Balance, variety, and an insurgent spontaneity.” But you can’t have insurgent spontaneity unless there is some stable frame against which to be insurgent.

- And he detests the avant-garde technique:
Here is a contrasting quote from another architectural theorist, Charles Jencks: "The architect proceeds as the avant-garde does in any battle, as a provocateur. He saps the edges of taste, undermines the conventional boundaries, assaults the thresholds of respectability, and shocks the psychic stability of the past by introducing the new, the strange, the exotic, and the erotic.

The conventional language did reinforce a sense of place and of time at Harvard, just as does the conventional language of all those little red Veritas emblems. Harvard is a stage set, just as is any city. Now it is so into its brand image–red brick, Georgian, all that kind of iconic imagery–that every time Harvard renovates the Faculty Club, it looks older.

At Princeton, the board of trustees and its planners have divided the campus into four quadrants. The old part of the campus is brand-image Princeton, where they’re building a Gothic Revival dorm. Princeton existed for 150 years before it ever did any Gothic Revival; that didn’t come along until about 1900. Gothic Revival was seen as the Anglophile tradition that America should be following, instead of all those other foreign things. That’s brand-image Princeton. Then they’re doing another quadrant that opens to the future with buildings by Frank Gehry and other current stars. So at Princeton, the rad-trad conflict is now immortalized by stylistic zoning. It’s a new invention.

What I’m arguing is that the same thing has happened to architecture. It has become frameable and signable. We’ve found a way to rip the building out of its context in time and space. And that, of course, is the result of the arrival of photography and other visual media. Photography is the removal of context. You can’t define it any better than that. A photograph of a work of architecture frames it off from the world and freezes it at a single moment in time; it frames it in both time and in space. We now live in a media culture so pervasive that we barely notice it. It is a world of framed visual images in our magazines, on our screens, and increasingly in our imaginations. We have come, therefore, to think of buildings as we think of paintings, not as existing in a specific time and place but in the worldwide stream of images.

- Yes yes, its stale and tired, but its in the context of my Peabody research, and therefore its nice, basic points and implications will serve as my other basis for intervention. Enough research, onto speculation...

BLDGBLOG: N.A.W.A.P.A.

2007-10-25T13:09:00.000-04:00

BLDGBLOG : "In any case, at one point, Reisner describes something called N.A.W.A.P.A.: the North American Water and Power Alliance. N.A.W.A.P.A. is nothing less than the hydrological fantasy project of a certain class of U.S. water engineers. In fact, Reisner talles us, N.A.W.A.P.A. would 'solve at one stroke all the West's problems with water' – but it would take 'a $6-trillion economy' to pay for it, and 'it might require taking Canada by force.' He quips that British Columbia 'is to water what Russia is to land,' and so N.A.W.A.P.A., if realized, would tap those unexploited natural waterways and bring them down south to fill the cups of Uncle Sam. Canadians, we read, 'have viewed all of this with a mixture of horror, amusement, and avarice' – but what exactly is 'all of this'? Reisner:
"Visualize, then, a series of towering dams in the deep river canyons of British Columbia – dams that are 800, 1,500, even 1,700 feet high. Visualize reservoirs backing up behind them for hundreds of miles – reservoirs among which Lake Mead would be merely regulation-size. Visualize the flow of the Susitna River, the Copper, the Tanana, and the upper Yukon running in reverse, pushed through the Saint Elias Mountains by million-horsepower pumps, then dumped into nature's second-largest natural reservoir, the Rocky Mountain Trench. Humbled only by the Great Rift Valley of Africa, the trench would serve as the continent's hydrologic switching yard, storing 400 million acre-feet of water in a reservoir 500 miles long."
And that's barely half the project!
The project would ultimately make "the Mojave Desert green," we read, diverting Canada's fresh water south to the faucets of greater Los Angeles – thus destroying almost every salmon fishery between Anchorage and Vancouver, and even "rais[ing] the level of all five [Great Lakes]," in the process.
After all, N.A.W.A.P.A. also means that the Great Lakes would be connected to the center of the North American continent by something called the Canadian—Great Lakes Waterway.
But N.A.W.A.P.A. is an old plan; it's been gathering dust since the 1980s. No one now is seriously considering building it. It's literally history."

Mobile Sweatshop

2007-10-20T23:55:00.000-04:00

Just to agitate before bed:

Why would it be controversial for, say, Nike to set up a fleet of mobile sweat shops that can capitalize on the needs of the global refugee crisis, and either
(1) act as a basis for a new society (think of the ads!)
(2) withdraw and relocate under threat

Headline: Nike Pod 4C Workforce lands in Lebanon

Jones Partners - ProDek System

2007-10-20T20:25:00.000-04:00

- Related enough when I saw it that I thought I'd include it. Architecture as infrastructure, as a machine for the living of/with other machines. Cohabiting in a machine with other machines of your choosing/specification. I love the accommodation of pre-designed corporate units, and the idea of the street as infrastructural delivery vein (here on the roofs), which is in line with Vidler's reading of infrastructure from Hausmanian Paris.

Two quotes (different articles, probably not relevant).

- "Here Eisenman is presented with a tactical difficulty since he does not have enough program to literally overwhelm, or even outflank Mies, which us the point of any Eisenman project. He must relinquish what Jacques Derrida has shown to be the superior position. In architectural terms, though, there is another level at which the concept of frame can be thought, another position opposed to figure: the ground, or the foundation of the frame, the frame of the frame. This becomes the site of his intervention and the vehicle for his critique." 110

- instead of ducks, Koolhaas builds duck-billed platypi (campus-as-architectural-zoo), therefore the IIT center is "all this platypus splooge" within a one-story box. wow.

anyway:

Note to Self

2007-10-20T18:47:00.000-04:00

As I begin completing dossier-style initial case studies, I will attempt to create a list of techniques, as well as a list of agents, relating to the state of exception.

Sophie Calle

2007-10-20T18:41:00.000-04:00

I looked at Sophie Calle, this was indeed the coolest, and most relevant (TACTIC), project:

"Auster later challenged Calle to create and maintain a public amenity in New York. The artist's response was to augment a telephone booth (on the corner of Greenwich and Harrison streets in Manhattan) with a note pad, a bottle of water, a pack of cigarettes, flowers, cash, and sundry other items. Every day, Calle cleaned the booth and restocked the items, until the telephone company removed and discarded them. This project is documented in The Gotham Handbook (1998)"

Bertolt Brech, Handbook for City-Dwellers

2007-10-20T18:30:00.000-04:00

I need to get a hold of a copy of Brecht's "Handbook for City-Dwellers." I saw two mentions of it today that, along with the title, make it seem potentially relevant. The problem is, I don't know what form of media it is, and I can't see much helpful mention of it online.

Notes on Dutton, Street Scenes of Subalternity

2007-10-20T18:24:00.000-04:00

Not sure how all this is directly relevant, nor how I even found it, but there are reverberations, and it sure gets the blood up, if nothing else.
Its also VERY LONG.

"Meanwhile, back in the PRC, things were different. Once the chairman
shuffled off this mortal coil, the curtains lifted on a new party performance
called economic reform. In sharp contrast to previous party
efforts, economic reform unleashed market forces, opened China to the
outside world, and introduced the benefits and vices of globalization to
the Chinese people. For this, the reform program received widespread
applause. But as the clapping dies away, one begins to wonder whether
reform has bought off or merely postponed the same kind of crisis that
turned "big brother" Russia into a very poor cousin. Indeed, as Rupert
Murdoch's Star TV beams in 1960s reruns to an ever eager Chinese
audience who are ordered not to watch, one is left wondering whether
other types of 1960s reruns are also about to be aired. Maybe the 1960s
show that sent shivers down the spine of the mayor of Philadelphia is
about to be relayed to China.

The streets of China aren't burning . . . yet. But the endless caravans
of rural migrants heading for the cities in search of work and wealth may
well have their own plotlines to add.

In conditions reminiscent of those outlined by Marx in his description
of the formation of the European working class, tens of millions of
would-be proletarians are now streaming into the cities of China in
search of employment. As they reach their destination, some find jobs
but most find their lives increasingly circumscribed by ever tightening
laws against vagrancy, prostitution, and hooliganism. Under these circumstances,
the odor of the backstreet begins to reek of social unrest.
For the Marxist, this is the smell of the backyard furnaces of revolution.
For me, I guess, there is the whiff of a different form of sedition.

While Marxists look to the macrolevel story, sifting through the tea
leaves of change to discern the beginnings o f a revolutionary class, more
localized street-level divination suggests something else. That "something
else" tells of more intimate and private rebellions. It is a story line
straight from Brecht, for it is not about revolutionary heroes but antiheroes.
It is in the lives of these often "resourceful, humorous nobodies"
that one begins to recognize a form of backstreet biopower that leads to a
kind of resistance very different to that imagined in Marxist dreams." 63-64

"Biopower is an interesting expression. It forces us away from grand
homologies and makes us attend to the seemingly insignificant. It introduces
a new concern for the interstices of government that turns, in so
many ways, on microlevel "ways of doing things" that produce calculable
outcomes for government. From social security to public security, government,
it seems, is about the disciplining of the everyday. Moreover,
under the Maoist-inspired mass-line local security systems, such disciplinary
forms appeared to operate everywhere. Indeed, the picture being
presented would be a perfect image of totalitarianism but for the fact that
it is less than "total." As we shall see, ordinary people have their own
forms of "disciplinary technologies" that can, and do, run counter to
those of government. In other words, just as there can be no display of
power without resistance, so can there be no deployment of biotechnology
without a struggle." 64-65

"An entirely different picture of the art of struggle in this era of global
maneuver emerges in these diminutive and modest forms of resistance,
which belie the Marxist message of revolution. Indeed, the artful subversions
of the sly dominate and work to ensure that government is not the
only thing generating "calculable outcomes." Here, one discovers a form
of "sly civility,"to steal a line from Homi K. Bhabha, that reveals
through its shadowy forms Michel de Certeau's "art of the weak."'
"Sly as a fox and twice as quick, there are countless ways of making
do," proclaims de Certeau as he lists innumerable examples of the heterogeneous
tactical plays on life by the antiheroes of this more modest
form of rebellion. From a stolen word to a stolen wallet, these are the
petty thieves of the everyday whose actions are crouched just below the
threshold of the label "rebellion." My concern, then, is not with the
political dissident whose words we all too readily know and whose voice
we hear so clearly. Rather, it is with those whose words are whispered or
whose contempt is articulated just out of earshot. Their words are mere
murmurs, for should they be otherwise, it would be an open declaration
of war on a "strategic field" that could only result in failure. A guerrilla
war of the everyday is going on just below the surface, requiring, it
seems, far more subtle forms of maneuver and resistance." 65

"A society," writes de Certeau, "is composed of certain foregrounded
practices organising its normative institutions and of innumerable
other practices that remain minor. The former practices he labels strategies
while the latter he names the tactic. While a strategic field of government
emerges out of "monotheistic" panoptic power, de Certeau quickly
adds that "a polytheism of scattered practices survives, dominated but not
erased by the triumphal success of one of their number." The "tactics of
the weak" come into play through these latter "subjugated" forms of
power or even through the "exchanges" opened up between them and
triumphant power. If power trades time for space, then resistant tactics
will always attempt to "turn the tables" and trade it back again. Thus the
prisoner in the cell has "all the time in the world" to map the cracks in
the wall that offer the opportunity to escape, for, as Catherine Ingraham
notes, even panoptic power must blink." 65

Wang's promise grew into a museum project that transformed his
tiny house into a shrine. Much to the chagrin of the local party officials,
the "very small museum" (xiuo xiuo bomuguun) he established was a success;
it led to the founding of a magazine (aptly named Contenlporary
Cultural Relic) and to the formation of an international communist
alliance. (See figure 1.) Like the rhetoric of Polus that Socrates so sarcastically
labeled his "museum of ornaments," Wang's museum was a "turning
of the tables" on the official Mao. It resurrected a Mao obsessed with
cultural revolution, a Mao as excessive as the badges that are pinned to
the chest and tell the Mao story. Wang's efforts spike the drinks of the
teetotaling homogeneous party accounts of Mao by mixing a more
potent radical otherness into the cocktail. This is champagne Mao, and
one we readily recognize, for it is on the surface of every badge ever
made in his image. It is a Mao who trades on the sacred, the erotic, and
the excessive. It is this other Mao who, quite by accident really, reveals
the scandal of both the chairman and the party's selective history of him.
The party, it seems, may set the strategic field, but the procedures within
that field always leave room for tactical maneuvers that can undermine it.
Yet de Certeau's account of tactics is remiss in at least one respect. It
fails to adequately recognize that the government of the strong plays its
own tactical games. In other words, tactics are not "of the weak," but
are "anybodies." Indeed, it is their very promiscuity that gives them protean
life." 66

"This is pure tactics. Nowhere is this subtle rewrite
more graphically demonstrated than in the theme park of revolution constructed
in Mao's home village of Shaoshan." 68

"the party has its share of problems with pirated copies
that would not only steal their thunder but will also steal their logo." 69

"In this way, language is transformed into a
variable code for the marking of different bodies, times, and positions.
The dexterity and speed of re-marking the body illustrates the nature of
the tactical lives these people live. But flexibility of meaning isn't always
to be found in the quick turn of phrase. It is also about remarking the
landscape to highlight one's own values and aspirations. While thieves
marked the body, it was always the party that marked the ground on
which these bodies walked." 70

"...one could not think of going home or going out without "going red," for virtually every
street name demanded it...some 475 streets were renamed to include the
word revolution. Between the "Red Sun" Roads and Study Chairman
Mao Alleys, one could not help but think revolution when thinking about
where to go." 72

"At the height of the cultural revolution, the street
on which the Soviet embassy stood was renamed and the embassy was
given a new number. Their new address: 1 Oppose Revisionism Road,
Beijing." 72

"They are the migrants who populate the cities but for whom the city
will always be a foreign place. They are despised as uncultivated or uneducated
tramps, or as morally unworthy streetwalkers. They are marked
out not only by overt signs of difference, such as the tattoo, but by a
series of less visible birthmarks. The way they dress, their speech patterns,
their dialects and customs all mark them out from city people.
With one designation, one Chinese character, they are marked as the
eternal undesirable. That character is liu and it means "to float." In combination
with other characters, liu marks out the social lepers of Chinese
society." 74

- This is almost reading like a textbook of ways to articulate social change (dubious types of change, to be sure) within legal petri dishes
or fabricated realities. Quite a bit sounds spatial, even quasi architectural. Scary. It also sounds weirdly like MODERNISM (I mean the arch kind).

"Two separate and unrelated acts of
government ensured this stilling of city populations. The first act symbolized
the type of mobile city life that was to be left behind, while the
second flagged the stable, static, socialist life to come. Both acts were
designed to halt the movement of people and things and to set in place a
regime of perfect calculation.
Act one of this two-part performance began at ten o'clock on the
morning of 10 June 1949 when the head of the newly formed Shanghai
Public Security Bureau led a team of 400 police and garrison troops
down to the Shanghai stock exchange. After surrounding the building
and calling on the occupants to come out, the police immediately arrested
238 of the occupants as speculators and registered the rest as suspects
before sending them home. The chaotic and fluid world of shares and
speculation came crashing down. A registered, stable life, not the floating
world of the share, would, in the future, determine one's fortune and
fate. A new equity came to displace old (in)equities! This alternative
vision of the future was unveiled a few months later.
This second act began in September when the Social Section of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party passed an edict instructing
all workplaces to establish personnel security sections to monitor, survey,
and register all staff and workers. This was the final brick in a wall that
surrounded a social arrangement known as the work-unit system. The
panoptic quest of the work-unit security forces could only succeed, however,
if these units supplied what Mauss, in a very different context and
with a slightly different meaning, referred to as a system of "total services."
Local work-unit-level party committees, therefore, developed a
system to provide for virtually all of life's material needs. As a consequence,
the concept of the main street, of shopping precincts, and of city
life as we know it began to fade into memory, and as these things waned
the work unit spread into most areas of life.
So it was that hidden behind compound walls that designated their
jurisdiction, work units set about establishing a labyrinth of small institutions
to provide for life's needs if not its pleasures." 76

"That dream imagined an "algebraic society" of registers (of
workers) and (work) units that would make everything visible and measurable.
The dream of a mathematically calculable socialism seemed but
a few sums away." 77
And this sounds like algorithmic architecture. I'm just sayin' sounds like.

"By trading in obligations, connections, and reciprocity,
work units not only began to cohere as tiny societies but were
able to live up to the production demands of party planners." 77

"The architectonics of the traditional compound house reinforced
patriarchy by ensuring an internal economy based on the hierarchical
ordering of family members. The ordering of rooms in the house hierarchizes
bodies, privileging the central gaze and guidance of the patriarch.
At the same time, its closed nature reinforces the powerful bonds of
interdependence between family members. A floor plan of the compound
house is, in this way, a map of the ethical and moral order of the
Confucian world. Space, symbolically coded and hierarchized in this
manner, makes every home a temple to the family and a "machine" to
train bodies in the art of Confucian comportment." 78

"Those who are not tied into such networks of social relations
are always on the outside, and limits are placed on their action. They are
the people to fear and the ones who remain huddled under the character
liu." 79

"...says Yi Zhongtian, "the day when every single person has a place that will
secure their fate and enable them to have a roof over their head is the
day when there will truly be great harmony under heaven." The opposite
of this, he continues, "is a state of great confusion. "If work units represented
stability, the people of liu are its opposite. Outside of any compound
wall, they signal danger to a society unused to movement. After
all, as Yi goes on to note, "floating or drifting is a form of movement
and movement leads to chaos."" 79

"Above ground, the neon lights and bright window displays
dazzle us. Beneath the surface, however, live the people of liu.
Street Scenes of Subalternity
The "people of liu" are the Chinese subaltern. They are the floating
outcasts of a society that is organized to ensure that everyone has a
place. They signal a challenge to this stability in a way that fundamentally
threatens the Chinese sense of community and self. If chai is the mark
of destruction of the old, then liu flags a fear of what the future might
bring. If chai signals a physical reorganization of the city-space to promote
a consumer-based future, liu signals the underside to this new
more mobile and more class-based society. Economic reform has left the
people of liu-the internal migrants, the poor, the destitute, the criminal,
and the undesirable-more vulnerable than at anytime since the 1949
revolution. Without connections, money, or position these people are
vulnerable both to police harassment and arrest and to popular local
resentment. Theirs is the human rights story all too often ignored in the
West, for it is a tale that seriously challenges the Western approach to the
question of rights." 81-82

- Yeah, that was a little much.

Case Study Questions ROUND 1

2007-10-18T16:57:00.000-04:00

A basic list of questions to use on each case study. This should help keep the initial inquiries short and sweet. However, each initial dossier should get a little specific to the case at hand. Then, as I have the first five or so cases, I will begin attempts at arranging/connecting/matrix-ifying them.

CASE STUDY QUESTIONS:

(1) What was its intention?

(2) What is the product/outcome?

visavis:
- objects
- organization
- (nouns & verbs)
- is it consciously representational or not?

(3) What is the primary instrument with which the exception is made/outlined/enclosed?

(4) In what system(s) is the exception being made?

Case Study List ROUND 1

2007-10-18T16:48:00.000-04:00

A no-holds-barred, no promises, compilations-style list of potential case studies:

CASE STUDY LIST:

Gitmo Mobile Court . DMZ . Zeebrugge Terminal . Yokohama Terminal . Offshore / Iron Mountain Data Haven . Google Pages . Baghdad Green Zone . Antarctica / The Moon . The High Seas (historical, privateers v pirates) . West Berlin / Marshall Plan . Big Ports (HK, Singapore, Denmark (BIG), Rotterdam, Bayonne) . Airports (Beijing, Hong Kong/Osaka, Manhattan Heliport). North Korea Tourist Zone . Cruise Ships . Disneyworld (w celebration) . CCTV Zones in London . Downtown Manhattan Security Zone . Dubai FTZ's . Military Bases (US, Germany, Diego Garcia, Uzbekistan/Azerbijan) . UN ICC . UN Refugee Camps . UN Yugoslavia / War (NGO's) . Insurgency Zones (Terrorists) . No-Fly Zones. National Refuge Zones . Ellis Island . National Parks / Wildlife Refuges / Coastal Public Zone . Oil Platforms . Tiny, Retarded Wannabe countries and Utopian Projects . Apec/Davos Summit Areas . Protest Pens . Google Earth Resolution . Phone / Data / Satellite Free Zones . Cell Phones and Data in Public Places / Google 700 MHz . Hudson Tards / High Line / (Special) Economic Development Zones . Syrian-Jewish Community and Jewish 'Property' zone in Manhattan . Ghettos (historical and current) . Favelas . Yakuza / Mafia . Cite Soleil . Mexico City . Kowloon Walled City . Cyprus and Belfast. Chernobyl / Three-Mile Island . Historical Modernist: TVA, Chandigarh, Brasilia . Nazi Germany (Speer) . Japanese-American Internment Camps . Shenzen . Vatican City and that country within a country within a country in one of the Emirates . Roche & Lavaux, exp. the Dust Bunny Building .

Notes from Meeting with TH: 10_05_07

2007-10-18T16:24:00.000-04:00

VERY HELPFUL:

in response to the relationship between the TVA and Modernism, between a State of Exception and modernism, between state power and tabula rasa as an ideal design condition/goal:

- Modernism as always needing a Tabula Rasa (one that was always gridded)
- Is the Green Zone modernism?

other historical examples (related):
- Brasilia (something about 10 old sheets of paper???)
- UN Headquarters
- Laws of preservation
- Chandigarh

Talk to AD about exploring this connection between modernism and state power/state of exception for my paper topic.

Use case studies to explore didactic states/types of exception:

- Basic questions: what was intention, what is the product/outcome
*object, organization - noun & verb, is it consciously representational or not?

- Make a 50-case matrix, 1 hour each, looking for salient issues to start actually making connections/groupings/deductions/assumptions

- for example, TH had a nice little blurb for the TVA case: It was intended to always increase potential.

In relation to my mention of the Roche & Laveaux article:

- Scripting vs. scripts
- 'scripting' as tactic (or strategy?)
- vs. a field manual
- assemble a set of case studies on TACTICS [and perhaps another one on OPERATORS] within these case studies of states of exception

- start thinking of small interventions that reverberate (as opposed to modernism); small scale but city wide

TACTICS

- Francois Roche: Dust Bunny Building (also garbage collector thing?)

- Things become infrastructure when they are controlled (see: Air after Pollution)

- Law/Code as soft infrastructure
'Negative' or opposite of infrastructure

- Matter is what is being controlled

- Maybe architecture can produce a state of exception rather than just build on one. This has huge potential for agency, no?

TACTICS

- Sophie Calle - artist - w/Paul Auster (Maybe talk to MM?) (Total Recall??)

- understand scripting as a contemporary architectural tactic. Like:
D+S Blur
Rem doing Wired

- Jameson, "Enclaves..." in Assemblage (Zeebrugge, "seeds of time" (?))

- Hans Hollein - later interventions/happenings (tactics...)

Notes Prepping for Meeting with TH on 10_05_07

2007-10-18T16:21:00.000-04:00

For the purposes of summarizing where I stand today, it would be best to first begin with a list. This list is a breakdown of ideas. These ideas are all interrelated somehow.

State of Exception

Agamben
History in relation to democracy
History in relation to the 2 world wars
Power and lacunas

Power and Architecture (The TVA)

The TVA as an architectural example of state of exception (not technically, I think, but we are getting there)
The state of exception placing specific demands on architecture
The TVA as infrastructure
The TVA in relation to Corb
The TVA in relation to modernism
Utopian projects, infrastructure, and power relations

Disciplinarity, Agency, and Power
Contemporary issues of power

States of exception as legal lacunas
Other types of legal lacunas
Architecture as relating to defunct powers
Specific, interesting lacunas
Operators within these lacunas
Easterling, Counterinsurgency

My thesis is (a nice closed loop...):

Restoring agency to architecture
Agency through large-scale speculation
Realistic speculation through real relationships with power
Political action through realistic power
Meaningful architecture through politics

And dont forget Kant and public works...and Deleuze...

- 4 types: executive (government), military (increasingly anti-terro, counterinsurgent), corporate (multinational, nomadic), informal (lawless)
- need a technique/set of issues/goal of presentation to approach these studies and organize them....what am I trying to learn from them.
- today, my thesis is about combining the refugee problem with the abandon ftz/shipping zone

Ok, so the first big problem for me is to how to arrange/choose/get into these dossiers/case studies. What to have in 3 weeks...

Richard I and the Science of War in the Middle Ages

2007-10-18T16:06:00.000-04:00

A couple of random notes on an essay about strategy/tactics in the middle ages, I guess made relevant by the same things that make the military relevant, and also because the Middle Ages seems like a somewhat related (and mentioned elsewhere...?) time period in terms of anything from power structures/state structures to a time of guilds and bandits and networks and nomadology...

- campaigns w/o battle vs. fighting on the march vs. pitched battle

- war as 'strategy of maneuver' requiring mostly effective administration

- the dominance of the fortified strongpoint meant that wars of attrition were dominant (rather than battles) ... leads to the importance of garrison troops, artillerymen (engineers), bowmen, incendiaries [guys tasked with the systematic razing of villages] and foragers.

- a War Machine (Delezue/Nomadology), no?

Involuntary park - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2007-10-18T14:42:00.000-04:00

Involuntary park - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Involuntary park is a term coined by science fiction author and environmentalist Bruce Sterling to describe previously inhabited areas that for environmental or political reasons have, in Sterling's words, 'lost their value for technological instrumentalism' and been allowed to return to an overgrown, feral state. Discussing involuntary parks in the context of rising sea levels due to global warming, Sterling writes:

"They bear some small resemblance to the twentieth century's national parks, those government-owned areas nervously guarded by well-indoctrinated forest rangers in formal charge of Our Natural Heritage©™. They are, for instance, very green, and probably full of wild animals. But the species mix is no longer natural. They are mostly fast-growing weeds, a cosmopolitan jungle of kudzu and bamboo, with, perhaps, many genetically altered species that can deal with seeping saltwater. Drowned cities that cannot be demolished for scrap will vanish wholesale into the unnatural overgrowth.[1]"

Examples include:
* The Green Line separating Greek and Turkish Cyprus
* The Korean Demilitarized Zone
* The Zone of alienation around the area of the Chernobyl disaster
* The White Sands Missile Range U.S. government military reservation. Location of the Trinity test site."

Downtown NY Security Zone

2007-10-18T14:20:00.001-04:00

Downtown Security zone (Outside the Stock Exchange, Etc) with Will.

Portable Halls of Justice Are Rising in Guantánamo

2007-10-13T13:51:00.000-04:00

Portable Halls of Justice Are Rising in Guantánamo - NYTimes
But in the five-year effort to prosecute Guantánamo detainees, very little has gone according to plan. So, to be ready for all eventualities, the Pentagon’s new judicial complex is portable — a prefabricated but very high-tech court building surrounded by trailers, moveable cells, concertina wire and a tent city — all of which has been shipped here in pieces that could be unplugged, disassembled and put back together somewhere else.

This year, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates rejected as “ridiculous” a plan to erect a $100 million permanent federal-court look-a-like here. The $12 million “M*A*S*H” set for the age of terror was born.

The centerpiece will be the courthouse, a squat, windowless structure of corrugated metal. Though it will hardly be much to look at, it will be outfitted with the latest in trial technology: a computerized system for digital document display; wiring for hidden translators working in as many as five languages; and a 10-camera automated system to beam video of the proceedings to a press center in an aging aircraft hangar nearby.

One new feature for trials expected to involve classified evidence is a plexiglass window separating the small press and spectator gallery from the floor of the courtroom. At the touch of a button, the military judge will be able to cut off the sound in the spectator section.

The tent city, complete with military cots and a recreation tent, is where some 550 court officials, lawyers, security guards and journalists from around the world are to live for weeks at a time once military commissions get under way, perhaps as soon as this spring.

“If you’re an avid camper, it’ll be great,” said Maj. Chad Warren, the operations officer of the construction unit, the 474th Expeditionary Civil Engineering Squadron.

If and when the trials begin, they will be held under a set of rules created especially for trying terrorism suspects. And now they will be held in a setting created especially for terrorism suspects.

Architecturally, it is beyond state of the art. “It’s something new,” Professor Lederer said. “We do not normally design courtrooms that can be folded up and shipped.”

Axe Murder Incident / Operation Paul Bunyan

2007-10-04T22:52:00.000-04:00

Axe Murder Incident / Operation Paul Bunyan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Altogether, Task Force Vierra consisted of 813 men, almost all of the men of the United States Army Support Group, of which the Joint Security Force was a part, a ROK reconnaissance company, a ROK Special Forces company which had infiltrated the river area by the bridge the night before, and members of a reinforced composite rifle company from the 9th Infantry Regiment. In addition to this force, every UNC force in the rest of South Korea was on full battle alert with all weapons loaded, ready to fire if needed."

"The engineers in the convoy disembarked from their vehicles once the convoy arrived, and immediately started cutting down the tree while standing on the roof of their truck, while the 2^nd Platoon truck was positioned to block the Bridge of No Return. The remainder of the task force dispersed to their assigned areas around the tree and assumed their roles of guarding the engineers."

Lacuna Force 5: Landscaping Tactics

"Except in the area around the truce village of Panmunjeom and more recently on the Donghae Bukbu Line on the east coast, humans for the most part have not entered the DMZ in the last fifty years. This isolation has created as a byproduct one of the most well-preserved pieces of temperate land in the world. Environmentalists hope that if reunification occurs the former DMZ will become a wildlife refuge. However, there will be significant obstacles to maintaining the site because of the high concentration of landmines across the area."

Joint Security Area - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2007-10-04T22:49:00.000-04:00

Joint Security Area - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Joint Security Area currently has around 100,000 tourists visit each year through several tourism companies[6][7] and the USO[8] (through the various U.S. military commands in Korea). Before being allowed to enter the DMZ, tourists are given a briefing during which they must sign a document which states, in part, 'The visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom will entail entry into a hostile area and possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action.'[9][10][11] Primarily tour companies from South Korea, Japan and the USO conduct tours. North Korean citizens are not allowed access on the tours, but citizens of other nationalities are."

"The tunnels were dug by North Korea and are likely for use by the military as an invasion route. The tunnels are each large enough to permit the passage of an entire division in one hour. All the tunnels run in a north-south direction and do not branch off. The planning for the tunnels got progressively more advanced (for example, the third tunnel slopes upward slightly as it progresses southward, so that water does not stagnate). The orientation of the blasting lines within each one indicate that North Korea dug the tunnels. Upon their discovery, the North claimed that they were for coal mining; however, no coal can be found in the tunnels, which are dug through granite, but some of the tunnel walls were at some point painted black to give the appearance of coal."

Kijong-dong/Daeseong-dong - DMZ Cities

2007-10-04T20:27:00.000-04:00

Kijong-dong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Kijŏng-dong (sometimes romanized as Gijeong-dong) is a village in Panmun-gun, North Korea. It is also called Peace Village (평화촌) on the northern side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). [1][2] By contrast, in South Korea it is known as Propaganda village (선전마을).[3] It is situated 1.8 kilometers from the South Korean village of Daeseong-dong, the only inhabited village in the southern side of the Korean DMZ. A guidebook published in the north states: 'In this village located in the Demilitarized Zone is the Panmun Cooperative Farm embracing over 200 households. The village has a kindergarten, creche [day care], senior middle school and a people's hospital.'[4] At various times field workers and building workers are seen in Kijŏng-dong. However, many in the south believe that Kijŏng-dong was built within the DMZ purely for the purpose of propaganda. The village reportedly has no residents except soldiers. At night lights come on in some of the buildings, but they turn on in the same buildings every night at the same time. The world's highest flag tower[5] stands at the entrance of Kijŏng-dong (160 meters tall) flying a North Korean flag. This tower was not originally as tall as it is now, but when the flag pole in Daeseong-dong was extended, thus making it taller than the Kijŏng-dong pole, the North again quickly extended their pole taller in what some have called the “flagpole war” (깃대 전쟁)."

Daeseong-dong, "South Korea, is a town in South Korea close to the North Korean border. It lies within the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The village is about one mile south of the Bridge of No Return towards the North and 7.5 miles from the city of Kaeseong, North Korea.

Daeseong-dong belongs administratively to Josan-ri, Gunnae-myeon in Paju. It is the only civilian habitation within the Southern portion of the DMZ with Panmunjeom 0.6 miles northeast, with the actual Military Demarcation Line (the de facto border between South and North Korea) only 400 yards north of the village.

Daeseong-dong is only one mile opposite of Gijeong-dong, a propaganda village in North Korea's portion of the DMZ. Here is the very place that an observer can see Korea's division, seeing the different national flags fluttering on gigantic flagpoles in Daeseong-dong and Gijeong-dong respectively.

While the DMZ is under the administration of the Allied Control Commission, the residents of Daesong-dong are considered South Korean civilians and subject to South Korean government law. Residents of Daesong-dong have both benefits and restrictions. For example, the residents have the same rights to vote and be educated, but they are exempted from national defense duties (conscription) and taxation. However, there are restrictions on many matters including the freedom of residence and change of residence, as well as an 11pm curfew."

‘The Kite Runner’ Is Delayed to Protect Child Stars - New York Times

2007-10-04T17:09:00.000-04:00

‘The Kite Runner’ Is Delayed to Protect Child Stars - New York Times:

"LOS ANGELES, Oct. 3 — The studio distributing “The Kite Runner,” a tale of childhood betrayal, sexual predation and ethnic tension in Afghanistan, is delaying the film’s release to get its three schoolboy stars out of Kabul — perhaps permanently — in response to fears that they could be attacked for their enactment of a culturally inflammatory rape scene."

"...issues stemming from the rising lawlessness in Kabul..."

"...warnings have been relayed to the studio from Afghan and American officials and aid workers that the movie could aggravate simmering enmities between the politically dominant Pashtun and the long-oppressed Hazara.

In an effort to prevent not only a public-relations disaster but also possible violence, studio lawyers and marketing bosses have employed a stranger-than-fiction team of consultants. In August they sent a retired Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorism operative in the region to Kabul to assess the dangers facing the child actors. And on Sunday a Washington-based political adviser flew to the United Arab Emirates to arrange a safe haven for the boys and their relatives.

“If we’re being overly cautious, that’s O.K.,” Karen Magid, a lawyer for Paramount, said. “We’re in uncharted territory.”

"...grappling with vexing questions: testing the limits of corporate responsibility, wondering who was exploiting whom and pondering the price of on-screen authenticity."

"In late July, with violence worsening in Kabul, studio executives looked for experts who could help them chart a safe course. Aided by lobbyists for Viacom, Paramount’s parent company, they found John Kiriakou, the retired C.I.A. operative with experience in the region, and had him conduct interviews in Washington and Kabul."

If film productions are effectively little states-within-states, like Easterling's tourism model, then this is what happens when such a network has unforseen crossover with a different, regional/cultural network. The walls breach. Oops.

But more importantly, imagine the "stranger-than-fiction team of consultants" that you would send to reconnoiter this problematic crossover snaring your global network. Would it ever, ever include an architect?

No, we have made ourselves useless, dead weight, in the hard-hiting mobile-operator class of disciplines that get things done in the world's most unique, difficult, and critical places.

Lacuna Force 5.

Tim Culvahouse, The TVA: Design and Persuasion - Initial Summary

2007-10-04T15:11:00.000-04:00

"...the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was chartered by Congress in 1933 at the urging of President Franklin Roosevelt to create "a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise." p.15

Infrastructure as an architectural engine of ideology. Its all about you catching (sometimes intentional) glimpses of architecturalized fragments, below the skin of nature, of a suggested/imagined/hinted/perceived broader network. Its glory-ful and fascistic but also bouncy and populist...

Architecture as/is no longer a machine for living but an enclosure/system-bus for other machines for living.

Because its (the TVA) a corporation, its particular skill is advertising its presence, making itself essential, but carefully not drawing unwanted attention.

"It was novel in at least three ways: it was modern, it was international, and it was - literally - electrifying." - p.17

How is this different, at least legally speaking, from what Halliburton is doing in Iraq? And the Army Corps of Engineers?

Corb stealing the use of Beton Brut from the TVA Norris Dam (visited '46) and using it at Marseille ('47-'52) - p.19

"Functionally, electricity was the most obviously modern element of the TVA. Formally it was an enigma. Except in the jagged arcs of lightning or the miniature lightning of the Van de Graaf generator, electricity has no shape. The paraphenalia of its generation and distribution had shapes - some suggestive, perhaps, of a new aesthetic, but an aesthetic not yet fully coalesced. The physical boundaries of water containment made more powerful formal suggestions: the great bulk and breadth of the dams raised novel questions of scale and articulation" - p.18

"Each of these three principles - continuity with the landscape, forms derived from engineering function, and architectural form as a tool for social equality - complemented perfectly the ambitions of the TVA." - p.19

I should do drawings over a few photos such as p.74 pipe emergence, p.70-1 deck continuous to water, p.66-7 haha, representing natural flow p.78-9

"their [large projects] persuasive appeal deriving not from familiar forms but from a consistency of treatment - both in style and in quantity. Because every detail fits seamlessly into the whole, there is a sense if rightness, even inevitability, to the projects." - p.20

"the Culvahouse homeplace was no longer on a hill - it was on a peninsula." - p.21

"the TVA roads betray a different attitude, gentler and less abrupt. Their designers did not merely defer to the hills, they choreographed a partnership of automobile and landscape."
- p.21 - and it should make itself everpresent as immediately as possible.

Is the TVA a/the state of exception as an overlay, manifested on the urban, or the world, grid? It has a staying power, once manifested...

"the continuities of the designed landscape obscure innumerable dislocations in the preexisting landscape - of dwelling, commercial and agricultural buildings, fields, even cemeteries - but these dislocations were themselves assiduously coordinated. The visible choreography of designed elements holds throughout the reservation, from the scale of the landscape , through the scale of the damn itself, down to the detail of a light fixture or a door-handle." - p.22

"for them the goal was to bring the abrupt forms of modern engineering design into continuity with the natural landscape and then to develop a connection among the built forms themselves, making of the whole a new nature." - p.22

its like we could rewind and jump off again, right before modernism begins to go wrong. Then pull an innovation-through-mastery move. don't deny the embedded politics, but you gotta have some chunk of existing history to start the whole thing with. could a lot of this fall in the category of rapid insertion, guerrilla or delta-force style, then undercover cia style?

"the landscapes, buildings, details, graphic elements, and murals of the TVA form a unified ensemble, a completeness in the classical sense, in which nothing may be added or taken away without diminishing the whole. The comprehensiveness of this vision is perhaps as important as any of its explicit messages in asserting the value of the TVA' s unprecedented transformation of a region. In the work of the tva's first decade, design is persuasion." - p.23

"the design of the TVA holds an important lesson for architects and planners today. Its architects eagerly embraced the larger implications of their designs for social renewal, and they seized the opportunity to create a new world in the image of a better place..." - p.28

And now, a random segue into a Lebbeus Woods chunk from Bldgblog, available here: Lebbeus Woods Interview

Following is Lebbeus Woods, on the photo below. I'm thinking of it in relation to the description somewhere in the TVA book about how the infrastructure meets the landscape, and how that relationship is critical. Maybe infrastructure is the wrong word, but the physical manifestations of whatever larger, partially visible system of architecture, at any rate. Peeling the landscape back...revealing...blurring the line between the mechanical and...the organic(?). Forget the sappy authenticity, but what about the idea of peeling back to reveal another scale of structural complexity?

I think the main thought I had, in speculating on the future of New York, was that, in the past, a lot of discussions had been about New York being the biggest, the greatest, the best – but that all had to do with the size of the city. You know, the size of the skyscrapers, the size of the culture, the population. So I commented in the article about Le Corbusier’s infamous remark that your skyscrapers are too small. Of course, New York dwellers thought he meant, oh, they’re not tall enough – but what he was referring to was that they were too small in their ground plan. His idea of the Radiant City and the Ideal City – this was in the early 30s – was based on very large footprints of buildings, separated by great distances, and, in between the buildings in his vision, were forests, parks, and so forth.But in New York everything was cramped together because the buildings occupied such a limited ground area. So Le Corbusier was totally misunderstood by New Yorkers who thought, oh, our buildings aren’t tall enough – we’ve got to go higher! Of course, he wasn’t interested at all in their height – more in their plan relationship. Remember, he’s the guy who said, the plan is the generator.

So I was speculating on the future of the city and I said, well, obviously, compared to present and future cities, New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it’s a small city compared with São Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale – and the scale I was interested in was the scale of the city to the Earth, to the planet. I made the drawing as a demonstration of the fact that Manhattan exists, with its towers and skyscrapers, because it sits on a rock – on a granite base. You can put all this weight in a very small area because Manhattan sits on the Earth. Let’s not forget that buildings sit on the Earth.

I wanted to suggest that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region.

So it was a romantic idea – and the drawing is very conceptual in that sense.

But the exposure of the rock base, or the underground condition of the city, completely changes the scale relationship between the city and its environment. It’s peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is. And the new scale relationship is not about huge blockbuster buildings; it’s not about towers and skyscrapers. It’s about the relationship of the relatively small human scratchings on the surface of the earth compared to the earth itself. I think that comes across in the drawing. It’s not geologically correct, I’m sure, but the idea is there.

The relation to Corb as a critic of New York and New York envisioned dramatically and infrastructuraly is interesting in light of my interest in the TVA, its historical moment, its relation to Corb, its relation to experimental modernism, even utopianism, and its systematic and political/legal frameworks. I need to start isolating common strands between a host of parallel cases, chosen from a larger pool to create a sort of balanced, selective portfolio of cases from which to find/synthesize a bunch of different architectural issues. These could be issues of politics, practice, philosophy or detailing. But they need to turn into real dossiers so i can put them on a big panel and start making connections between them. Its gotta go into that stage!

BLDGBLOG: That’s actually one of the things I like so much about your work: you re-imagine cities and buildings and whole landscapes as if they have undergone some sort of potentially catastrophic transformation – be it a war or an earthquake, etc. – but you don’t respond to those transformations by designing, say, new prefab refugee shelters or more durable tents. You respond with what I’ll call science fiction: a completely new order of things – a new way of organizing and thinking about space. You posit something radically different than what was there before. It’s exciting.

Woods: Maybe it will be great – but it’s not enough. I think architects – at least those inclined to understand the multi-disciplinarity and the comprehensive nature of their field – have to visualize something that embraces all these political, economic, and social changes. As well as the technological. As well as the spatial.

But we’re living in a very odd time for the field. There’s a kind of lack of discourse about these larger issues. People are hunkered down, looking for jobs, trying to get a building. It’s a low point. I don’t think it will stay that way. I don’t think that architects themselves will allow that. After all, it’s architects who create the field of architecture; it’s not society, it’s not clients, it’s not governments. I mean, we architects are the ones who define what the field is about, right? So if there’s a dearth of that kind of thinking at the moment, it’s because architects have retreated – and I’m sure a coming generation is going to say: hey, this retreat is not good. We’ve got to imagine more broadly. We have to have a more comprehensive vision of what the future is.

Agamben, State of Exception - Summary

2007-10-04T14:52:00.000-04:00

The general summary of Agamben's discussion of the State of Exception (as it is relevant for me right now):

The State of exception as a problem

"The essential contiguity between the state of exception and sovereignty was established by Carl Schmitt in his book Politische Theologie (1922). Although his famous definition of the sovereign as "he who decides on the state of exception" has been widely commented on and discussed, there is still no theory of the state of exception in public law, and jurists and theorists of public law seem to regard the problem more as a quaestio facti than as a genuine juridical problem." p1

Politics vs Law, the no-man's land

"...it is difficult even to arrive at a definition of the term given its position at the limit between politics and law. Indeed, according to widely held opinion, the state of exception constitutes a "point of imbalance between public law and political fact (Saint-Bonnet 2001, 28) that is situated - like civil war, insurrection and resistance - in an "ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political" (Fontana 1999, 16)." p1
"It is this no-man's-land between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life, that the present study seeks to investigate. Only if the veil covering this ambiguous zone is lifted will we be able to approach an understanding of the stakes involved in the difference - or the supposed difference - between the political and the juridical, and between law and the living being. And perhaps only then will it be possible to answer the question that never ceases to reverberate in the history of Western politics: what does it mean to act politically?" p2

A diagram

I feel like there is a diagram to draw here to sum up the problem of the state of exception (especially as that problem relates to the difference between political and legal). It has to do, basically, with whether the state of exception is a political construct entirely outside of the law (and thus also a legal form of something that is not legal), or a legal construct that mandates the suspension of law itself, and therefore an inside/outside legal issue.
For now that diagram is this (and I'm not really sure state of nature is appropriate in here according to Agamben):

Civil war, and a permanent state of emergency

"Because civil war is the opposite of normal conditions, it lies in a zone of undecidability with respect to the state of exception, which is state power's immediate response to the most extreme internal conflicts." p2
"legal civil war" - the Third Reich as "a state of exception that lasted 12 years." p2
"In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones." p2
"Faced with the unstoppable progression of what has been called a "global civil war," the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. The transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a technique of government threatens radically to alter - in fact, has already palpably altered - the structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forms. Indeed, from this perspective, the state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism." p2-3
"...it is important not to forget that the modern state of exception is a creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one." p5

Evolution

"...the democratic regimes were transformed by the gradual expansion of the executive's powers during the two world wars and, more generally, by the state of exception that had accompanied and followed those wars. They are in some ways the heralds who announced what we today have clearly before our eyes - namely, that since "the state of exception has become the rule" (Benjamin 1942, 697/257), it not only appears increasingly as a technique of government rather than exceptional measure, but it also lets its own nature as the constitutive paradigm of the juridical order come to light." p7
Relationship to dictatorship (constitutional vs. sovereign)
Benjamin (from Agamben): "No sacrifice is too great for our democracy, least of all the temporary sacrifice of democracy itself." p9
Then, a long discussion (see diagram above, maybe) of the difference between states that regulate the state of exception in the constitution or by law, and states that choose not to explicitly regulate it.
This is probably enough of Agamben for now, the rest gets hyper-technical.

Terms and names

state of exception, state of emergency, state of necessity, (by) military order, no-man's land, state of siege (both political and fictitious), emergency decrees, martial law, emergency powers, full powers, state of peace vs. state of war,

Roche/Lavaux Etc in Log 10: I've head about...(a flat, fat, growing urban experiment)

2007-10-04T12:00:00.000-04:00

In issue 10 of Log, Francois Roche and Co. (R&SIE(N) +D, whatever that insane, swollen acronym stands for now) propose I've heard about: "a fractal structure made quite literally of contingent secretions. Its architecture is based on the principles of random growth and permanent incompletion. It develops by successive scenarios, without the authority of a plan. Its physical composition renders the community's political structure visible."

According to them, the project is a politically charged response to "The contemporary city's developmental tools," which "manifest the tyranny of tightly scripted, deterministic procedures - planning mechanisms based on predictability." Ok, so I'm not such a big fan of the scripting as such a literal response to the repressiveness of of contemporary urbanism. The rhetoric, and the fact that it chooses to move through a political/legal framework to embed a utopian condition within the ever-present interstices of the contemporary urban fabric, however, are fascinating.

They want to alter, to loosen, the script that is driving contemporary development. And they want to do it specifically to counter the extant power structures: "There is no reason to believe that the "everything under control" operating modes that condition the production of urban structures are capable of reflecting the complexities (the intertwining of issues and relational modes) of a mass media society, where the multitude of citizens is gradually taking over the republic's centralized authorities." Again, I think the rhetoric is good, even if the scripting solution seems somewhat flat in response. A Script, however, might be the right idea. But the kind of script I am thinking about would contain more looseness, inherently, than a computer script. Why, in a quest for looseness, would you begin with something so rigid as a computer script? A theatrical script, for example, has so much for flexibility, room for penetration and interpretation? Also, it would begin to embody a multitude of subjectivities, rather than sort of erasing subjectivity entirely (which I would argue their algorithm is ideally trying to do). They say they want to proceed without "the authority of a plan." Now we need to begin to distinguish between a script (any kind, computer or otherwise) and a plan.

"The city's making suffers from a deficit of democracy and the abuse of tools that date back to a time when the reason of the few presided over the destiny of the many." Here I would disagree a little: I'm not really sure a deficit of democracy is the real issue, and I don't necessarily agree that an open, pluralistic, effectively statistical solution is a valid one. I think the planning power that used to reside with "the reason of the few" has now shifted elsewhere. Its just a different few now, one that maybe seem for palpable, or at least less obvious, at first glance. Rather than proposing a fantastically democratic process as the cure-all (a solution which, in situations like the WTC competition, have proven to be useful addenda rather than driving forces), I would argue that locating these new centers of power (lacunas...states of exception...infrastructural incubators) and engaging them (as architects) is the solution. This engagement can be sincere or subversive...

Their solution espouses contradiction and seems to fear prediction above all else. In essence, "it seems to be a city." That's a strange statement to make considering that they just railed against cities as products of antiquated, autocratic planning. Which would suggest that maybe they are going after only the aura of unpredictability, which would make the use of scripting fitting, yet basically a kind of didactic, ironic postulation.

Some of the other stuff is wonderfully seductive. Evocative statements and tantalizing propositions.

- "Something shapeless grafted onto existing tissue, that needs no vanishing point to justify itself, but instead embraces a quivering existence immersed in a real time vibratory state, in the here and now."

- "...comes out of the ensemble of its individual contingencies...ceaselessly subsumes premises, consequences, and an ensemble of induced perturbations. Its laws exist in the substance of the place itself, with no input of memory."

- Not so sure about "the end of grand narratives...a suspicion of all morality...the urgent need to renew democratic mechanisms...fiction is its reality principle." Can all these statements even work together? I'm never sure at what level of intentional obfuscation, or all-out contradiction, to read their work at. Isn't this a grand narrative...

-Hmmm: "Does it have a moral law or social contract that could extract us from reality, protect us from it, or prevent us from living there? No. The neighborhood protocol...does not escape the risk of being in this world." What is reality here? A soup of pure lawlessness? And what is a neighborhood without a social contract, or even but a social contract?

-"It is a zone of emancipation, produced so that we can keep the origins of its founding act eternally alive, so that we can always live with and reexperience the beginning." Weird creation longing, no? Anyway, with its externality and being rather than becoming it is starting to sound a little like the nomadology of Deleuze's war machine (though I am not sure I could tell you what that means yet...)

-"the public sphere is everywhere...drive by postulates that are contradictory but nonetheless true." Contradictory made true simply through the smoothing of statistics, of mass aggregation?

-"The world is terrifying when it is intelligible, when it clings to some semblance of predictability, when it seeks to preserve a false coherence."

-The "Generative Schemas" read like a sort of legal contract stipulating the form of randomness to be used. I like that it seems primarily based on reading human secretions. I think I like that it is essentially structural (essentially architectonic) in nature. I like that it is self-reflexive. So basically, I am interested a lot in this long technical contract (which I will not retype here) which is most certainly not a computer script, but leans closer to an actual script (which I think would sound too old-school for them). To a rudimentary legal framework or nascent social contract.

-Basically, what I am saying is, I think they just wrote a new set of protocols linking a restored, worshiped individual human agency with a "group" (machines) that flawlessly translates the desires of this agency into a giant, perfect and imperfect diagram.

Also, the Volume interview with Francois Roche (especially weird because he refuses to have anything but his hands photographed) is available here:
http://www.new-territories.com/columbia%20interview.htm

Note: this interview drew out (for me) a long comparison with what Daft Punk (also French) has accomplished by turning themselves entirely into robots (or animation, or blurred photos, or bags over their heads) and erasing their human existence (except for one blurry image from the 90s) in the public eye.
See the Visual Components section of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daft_Punk

Kipnis Lecture Summary

2007-10-03T15:59:00.000-04:00

I summarized the Kipnis lecture from last year today (for other reasons) and found the summary somewhat helpful in terms of refreshing a particular view on contemporary architecture, and on politics, criticism and the question of criticality in particular. I liked it better now than when I first heard it.

Here's the lecture:
http://sorcerer.design.harvard.edu/gsdlectures/f2006/JKipnis.mov

Here's the summary:

"Overall, as I understood it, the lecture was Jeff's attempt to begin developing a set of criteria that could help him to discriminate between different contemporary architectures/problems. The provocative comparisons that he wants to get at would be Diller vs. Leeser vs. FOA, Seattle Lib vs. Co-op Himmelblau in Dresden, or Rem as single surface (Porto vs. Jusieu vs. Seattle).

He goes about this agenda first by arguing that he thinks the time of possibility for an abstract idea being instantiated as a concept within an architecture (as one of potentially many disciplinary instantiations of that abstraction) is over, and instead one should move on to affect as a source of criticality (he argues that he wants architecture to continue being instrumentally subversive towards its relationship with power). Moving from an idea like "democracy" to an affect like "freedom." Going from "strategy" to "tactics." He says: each discipline produces a body of effects that shape the way we relate to the world and one another, the politics of the world.

He proposes that critics read and discuss and study affect through architecture's details, which according to him are how architecture takes up the problem of affect in relation to its own forms of expertise. He then goes through a case study of the detail of the floorplate (and/or ceiling slab) and its relation to the groundplane, drawing distinctions between (1) conceptual projects (Corb Savoye, floating, turns 'land' to 'ground', depoliticizes, one of many datums) (2) performative projects (Mies Gallerie, two identical planes, staging artificial performances, replaces a datum with a metropolitan field, highly artifactual stages) (3) new authenticity projects (Wright Prairie, connection to ground as land, reemergence of a past political ground).

He focuses on the details of surface in general, and in particular the single surface problem (in many incarnations, with different levels of abstraction). I think for him Rem would become performative (though he stops before really saying these, I think), and Herzog maybe new authenticity, and maybe Diller would be conceptual. In any case, at its core, the argument seems like it has an interest in returning critical attention to the detail as the source of a projects' ability to be evaluated with regard to its appropriate relatives, and considered a success or failure."

Plus the ultra-concise summary, very effective-and-related-to-my-thesis-machinations:

-Disciplinary specificity: each discipline produces a body of effects that shape the way we relate to the world and one another, the politics of the world - modernism: an effort to install a new politics through an architecture of revolution, through a strategic move - related to a democratic idea of politics - when that failed, abandon the idea of strategies - take up tactics to resist Bataille's attack that architecture is always a friend of power - continue to be subversive - how do you participate with power, enjoy your relationship to it but at the same time undermine it - critique is now one of a number of ways to do this - and affect (replacing ideas and concepts) is another way - affect through details, details architecture's unique sphere - relation to the ground as the fundamental question propagating questions of detailing - performative as the most interesting type of ground - artifice as necessary for performance - wham.

cityofsound: The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown

2007-10-02T15:49:00.000-04:00

cityofsound: The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown: "As Marcus points out, this design work now also include a tightening of the informational grip on the city, by deliberately eroding data services over strategic locations. He describes as a 'lo-fi-ing of Sydney, resolution as security measure', in which Google Earth/Maps high-resolution imagery of the Sydney CBD is subtracted, such that it becomes temporarily blurred over the Opera House and other related places. One speculates as to how that happened. (Of course, Google wouldn't want to be held responsible if anything terrible did happen, as will no doubt have been pointed out to them. Though it's a little ludicrous to suggest that their service offers the potential plotter anything over the many readily accessible, detailed paper maps of Sydney apparently still in existence.) It's also strange to note just how overly precise the blurring is. In this image below, of Google Maps on my phone taken on Wednesday, note how the edge of the Opera House (left) is the exact point at which the blurring/sharpening occurs. A curiously limited definition of the danger zone."

So...a virtual zone of exception, huh? I'm not sure I totally buy it because the blurred zone follows a neat line between sat-photo angles and resolutions that you can track along the landforms to the east. Here's the link. Nonetheless, its a fascinating idea.

The World's Largest Anechoic Chamber

2007-10-02T15:40:00.000-04:00

The World's Largest Anechoic Chamber"The architecture, engineering, and construction support services for this major complex have been provided since 1987 by DMJM (DBA Holmes & Naver, Inc.). The anechoic chamber supports ground testing of electronic warfare systems on full-scale aircraft and is a massive 250 x 264 x 70 foot steel plate box enclosed in a metal hangar building. The walls, ceiling, and floor are covered in 816,000 pyramidal foam cones designed to absorb radio frequency signals, and the chamber is RFI shielded to over 100dB. The center of the chamber is equipped with a 160 foot diameter turntable capable of rotating a full 360 degrees while holding objects with a mass of over one million pounds!"

Crazy...it's like a tiny state of exception...just an audio-state instead of a legal state.

Hog Island - Global Security

2007-10-02T15:37:00.000-04:00

Hog Island: "On 31 August 1917 contracts for the construction of three great Government-owned ship fabricating plants were awarded by the Emergency Fleet Corporation to the American International Corporation, the Submarine Boat Corporation, and the Merchants Shipbuilding Company, and orders were issued to exert every effort to rush the work. American International Shipbuilding was the largest single recipient of contracts awarded by the US government Emergency Fleet Corporation. The company signed substantial contracts for war vessels with the Emergency Fleet Corporation. The first contract called for fifty vessels, followed by another contract for forty vessels, followed by yet another contract for sixty cargo vessels.

Hog Island was a sizable piece of land -- about a thousand acres -- between Philadelphia and Chester, south of what was known then as League island, with a frontage along the Delaware River. The land was sold to the AIC in June 1917, well before the awarding of the Hog Island contract, after the transaction was in the government-business negotiation machinery in May], but well before public awareness [in August]. Hog Island landowners, jacked up the price to $2000 an acre, versus the $100 price that was previously the going rate.

Hog Island was built in just 10 months, under the shadow of scandal."

"The site was sold to the city of Philadelphia in April of 1930 for $3,000,000, a little less than twice what the Shipping Board paid for the land alone in 1920. It was scheduled to be the terminus of a major air, rail and water port, with most of the acreage occupied by the shipyard ways destined to be a 494-acre airport. This site is now occupied by Philadelphia International Airport."

I guess this clarifies most of the legal workings...this is pretty intense. Who knew?

Hog Island, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2007-10-02T15:27:00.000-04:00

Hog Island, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "European settlers purchased Hog Island from the Lenape Indians in 1680. The settlers gradually developed the island by building log and earthwork dikes to minimize storm damage and convert the marshes into good grazing meadows. Hog Island supposedly got its name from the pigs which local residents left to roam free, as no fencing was needed.

In 1917, as part of the World War I effort, the US government contracted American International Shipbuilding to build ships and a shipyard at Hog Island. At the time Hog Island was the largest shipyard in the world with 50 slipways. The first ship (named USS Quistconck for the Lenape name for the site), was christened August 5, 1918 by Edith Bolling Wilson (wife of US president Woodrow Wilson). The shipbuilding process practiced on Hog Island was an early experiment in standardized construction of ships. The ships built there, known as 'Hog Islanders' were considered ugly but well-built. In all 122 Hog Islanders were built, mostly cargo ships, and a few troop transport ships. The shipbuilding continued until 1921, after which the facility was rapidly demolished. None of the ships were ready in time to participate in World War I, but many of them were involved in World War II.

The US Army Corps of Engineers filled in the creek separating Hog Island from the mainland with silt dredged out of the shipping channels so that Hog Island became part of the mainland. Starting in 1925, the Pennsylvania Air National Guard used a small part of Hog Island as a training field for its pilots. In 1927, the site was dedicated as the "Philadelphia Municipal Airport" by Charles Lindbergh, who flew in on the Spirit of Saint Louis. In 1930 the city of Philadelphia purchased Hog Island from the federal government for $3 million, in order to expand the airport. Because of the Great Depression, work on the airport did not actually begin until 1937, and the Airport was formally opened as Philadelphia Municipal Airport on June 20, 1940."

I guess this sort of answers questions about the legal status of Hog Island:
The federal government contracted a company to build a shipyard on the island.
It was filled in to connect it to the mainland by the Corps of Engineers.
It was eventually bought by Philadelphia from the federal government and turned into the airport.
Still, how was it federal government property first and not just a part of Pennsylvania, when it was an island?

BLDGBLOG: Hog Island

2007-10-02T14:38:00.000-04:00

BLDGBLOG:
"Hog Island was a shipbuilding yard – in fact, we read, it was "the largest shipyard in the world" during WWI.

The yard covered 846 acres and comprised 250 buildings. It had 80 miles of railroad track; 3,000,000 feet of underground wiring; a hospital; YMCA, hotel, cafeteria, trade school, 12 service restaurants and 5 mess halls. Twenty locomotives, 465 freight cars and 165 motor trucks hauled material within the yard. Hog Island's telephone traffic was equivalent to that of a city of 140,000 inhabitants.And though Hog Island is now barely known outside of war historical circles, it was a true industrial behemoth:

There never before had been conceived or executed a plan for the fabrication of ships on such an enormous scale. Every steel fabricating plant in America, 88 of them in all, from Montreal to Kansas City, funneled steel plate into Hog Island and machinery and gear from hundreds of manufacturing plants all over the country poured into the mammoth assembly plant.It was "a sizable piece of land – about a thousand acres – between Philadelphia and Chester, south of what was known then as League island," but it was also something of a manmade artifact, an artificial terrain.
Partially constructed from dredged fill in a "glorified bog," the industrialized earthworks were then turned – as you can see in the image, above – into a kind of machine-island, built to order."

I wonder what the legal status of this island was?

BLDGBLOG: Lights Among The Ruins

2007-10-02T00:06:00.000-04:00

BLDGBLOG : "Based on an eyewitness account written by an Allied Air Commander, Sebald then refers to 'the terrible and deeply disturbing sight of the apparently aimless wanderings of millions of homeless people amidst the monstrous destruction, [which] makes it clear how close to extinction many of them really were in the ruined cities at the end of the war.' For some reason the next line just haunts me: No one knew where the homeless stayed, although lights among the ruins after dark showed where they had moved in. Which leads me to ask myself whether it's simply a factor of my age – I'm not exactly getting younger here – though I do drink a lot of orange juice – or if it's something more closely related to the weirdly militarized political climate in which we now live, but I've started to react to things like this with a kind of concentrated studiousness, as if reading – absurdly – for advice on how to survive my own generation's coming, perhaps even more calamitous, future. What 'monstrous destruction' of world war and oil shortages and global terror and climate change might we, too, have to face someday? In twenty years' time will I be out holding up some pathetic light among the ruins of a destroyed city, wondering where my wife is, dying of thirst, deaf in one ear, covered in radiation burns? Or is that just a peculiarly American form of pessimist survivalism? Or do I just read too much Sebald?"

Whoa.

Provinces Use Rebuilding Money in Iraq - New York Times

2007-10-01T00:56:00.000-04:00

Provinces Use Rebuilding Money in Iraq - New York Times: "For a province whose entire 2007 capital budget is $112 million, $70 million is a stunning addition. In fact, the rate of spending has some authorities concerned that the push for provincial spending could drive a wave of corruption. They fear it could also unleash new centrifugal forces in a country already on the verge of breaking into semiautonomous regions.

But in Mr. Salih’s view, the degree of independence exercised by provinces like Babil in local rebuilding is consistent with Iraq’s Constitution, which envisions a federal system with substantial powers granted to regions.

Those moves were an indicator of the increasing uselessness of the old Iraqi apparatus of centralized government, Mr. Salih said.

“This central bureaucracy is broken,” he said. “The national ministries have proven incapable of spending their budgets.”

To illustrate his frustration, he related the case of a school in Babil that he said had been built with provincial money. But once it was built, the national education ministry proved so dysfunctional that it could not furnish it."

The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste - New York Times

2007-10-01T00:49:00.000-04:00

The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste - New York Times: "The toothpaste had entered Panama through the Colón Free Trade Zone on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal. One of the world’s biggest free zones, with 30,000 workers and 2,500 businesses, it is a place where billions of dollars in goods are unloaded, stored and either sold or reshipped free of tariffs. From there, 5,000 to 6,000 tubes slipped into the Panamanian market, without proper certification, mixed in with animal products, investigators said. A much larger number of tubes were reshipped from the free zone to other Latin American countries."

"As reports from around the world mounted, Chinese officials showed they were not immune to the criticism. When the makers of Sensodyne tracked counterfeit toothpaste through the Dubai Free Trade Zone to a factory in Shejiang Province in China, regulators there shut it down, a spokesman for Sensodyne said. The government also closed the chemical company that made the poison used in the toxic Panamanian cough syrup."

Wow: free trade zones were the blackmarket network that moved (and seemed to make possible) the chinese toothpaste debacle.

Blackwater Selling Weapons to Terrorists - NYTimes

2007-09-30T14:14:00.000-04:00

NYTimes, September 22, 2007: "Feds Target Blackwater in Weapons Probe By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:21 a.m. ET WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday."

The Open-Source War By JOHN ROBB

2007-09-29T00:24:00.000-04:00

The Open-Source War By JOHN ROBB: "Given this landscape, let's look at alternative strategies. First, out-innovating the insurgency will most likely prove unsuccessful. The insurgency uses an open-source community approach (similar to the decentralized development process now prevalent in the software industry) to warfare that is extremely quick and innovative. New technologies and tactics move rapidly from one end of the insurgency to the other, aided by Iraq's relatively advanced communications and transportation grid - demonstrated by the rapid increases in the sophistication of the insurgents' homemade bombs. This implies that the insurgency's innovation cycles are faster than the American military's slower bureaucratic processes (for example: its inability to deliver sufficient body and vehicle armor to our troops in Iraq).

Second, there are few visible fault lines in the insurgency that can be exploited. Like software developers in the open-source community, the insurgents have subordinated their individual goals to the common goal of the movement."

Subtopia: Stephen Graham

2007-09-28T22:30:00.000-04:00

Imaginary Geographies

Subtopia:
"[Bryan Finoki] Switching from those kinds of virtual cogs in the war machine let’s talk about the more physical gears of retooling the battlefield. Much has been written about the relationship of urban warfare and the sort of ‘perishibility of colonialism’ that we are witnessing in the urbanization of insurgency. You’ve talked about how modern infrastructure has historically been seen as the triumph of man’s ability to control nature, yet in the context of war infrastructure is the most vulnerable component of the city and ultimately the power of modernism. In this scenario the infrastructure becomes a weapon to be turned back onto itself, and the bane of a city’ own existence.

However, this is not merely an informal tactic on just the part of terrorists. Less attention seems to have been given to the ways more formal sponsors of disruption actually function. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on state-backed disruptions of urban infrastructure that are or are not similar from the insurgent disruptions of city systems. John Robb describes an “open-source warfare” used by the insurgents to swarm the more traditional military paradigms of American super power. Could you elaborate on the state-sponsored acts of infrastructural warfare as thy have grown from the WWII bombing campaigns on urban structures in Europe to the more systematic destructive re-landscaping that we find taking place for example in the West Bank or Iraq?.

[Stephen Graham] Actually, state-backed infrastructure disruption is far more damaging than anything that infrastructural insurgents or terrorist could ever hope to achieve. With wholesale carpet bombing of civilians now illegitimate, militaries such as the US and IDF now bring coercive pressures to bear on whole city populations by demodernising cities and deliberately ‘switching off’ the circuits essential to modern urban life. This is justified because urban infrastructures are deemed to be ‘dual use’ in international law. This has been called the strategy of ‘bomb now, die later’ or the ‘war on public health’."

"Underpinning US infrastructural warfare strategy is the notion of the "enemy as a system". A doctrine that developed from the “industrial web” ideas used to shape Allied bombing in World war II, this doctrine was devised by a leading US Air Force strategist, John Warden, within what he termed his strategic ring theory (1995) and has been the central strategic idea driving all major US bombing campaigns since the late 1980s. This systematic view of adversary societies, which builds directly on the industrial web theorisation of US air power strategists in World War II, provides the central US strategic theorisation that justifies, and sustains, the rapid extension of that nation’s infrastructural warfare capability."

"[Stephen Graham] The California case certainly was an extreme example of the corporate takeover of key ‘public’ infrastructure and the possibilities of corporate corruption through deliberate disruption and ‘shock treatment’. It was also a microcosm of the dangers of forcibly reengineering public infrastructures through the application of extreme and completely inappropriate neoliberal ideologies – a saga repeated through many ‘structural adjustment’ policies in the global south and Eastern Europe in the last few decades."

"...In the case of the U.S., this is likely to be backed up by large-scale private military corporations, supported by a small, elite military presence relying on high-tech surveillance and targeting within what the Pentagon is calling the ‘long war.”..."

"...Instead, the US state military, in particular, increasingly shepherd a vast array of private military, security and ‘reconstruction’ corporations – as well as proxy armies. These are utterly unregulated and unscrutinised and able to perpetuate civilian atrocities and absorb their own casualties almost invisibly whilst the western media continues to fetishise about dreams of ‘clean’ war through new technology...."

"...First, as Derek Gregory has argued, the voyeuristic consumption by Western publics of the U.S. and UK urban bombing campaigns -- a dominant feature of the ‘war on terror’ -- is itself based on mediated representations where cities are actually constructed as little more than physical spaces for receiving murderous ordnance. Verticalized web and newspaper maps in the U.S. and UK, for example, have routinely displayed Iraqi cities as little more than impact points where GPS-targeted bombs and missiles are either envisaged to land, or have landed, are grouped along flat, cartographic surfaces...."

"...through video games produced by the U.S. military, such as America’s Army and Full Spectrum Warrior, millions of westerners (and others) regularly immerse themselves in stylised renditions of fictional ‘Arab’ cities to fight for ‘freedom’ and cleanse these cities of shadowy ‘terrorists'...."

Subtopia: Simon Norfolk - War Photos

2007-09-28T21:23:00.001-04:00

BLDGBLOG: Bunker Archaeology

2007-09-28T20:57:00.001-04:00

BLDGBLOG: Bunker Archaeology

BLDGBLOG: An Interview with Jeffrey Inaba

2007-09-28T20:29:00.000-04:00

BLDGBLOG: Of Cars, Dogs, Golf, and Bad Feng Shui: An Interview with Jeffrey Inaba:

"Inaba: You know, some of my other work has been on suburbia, and the thing that we’re more and more convinced by is that the 21st century megacity will be a space – or urban condition – not defined by 20th century concepts of density or urbanity. Instead, it will be determined by two things: the suburb and the favela – the informal. You can think of LA as a proto-condition for this. But the places experiencing new architectural forms, new types of rapid growth, alternative patterns of collective development, extreme forms of communication, and a concern for planning stemming from necessity – these are all now happening in areas that are suburban, in areas that are informal. And that includes favelas. These are the generative elements of the 21st century city."

BLDGBLOG: Favelas are architecturally interesting – but they’re economically generated. In other words, the architecture – the space – comes second. So where does the favela actually come from? Is a favela formed from the bottom-up, as an organic outgrowth of local conditions? Or is it formed from the top-down – as a kind of architectural symptom of globalization and economic inequality?

Inaba: That’s a really good question. You can find conditions in LA that you might think would be more typical of Mexico City, Cairo, or Lagos – and, yeah, I think you can read that through global capital flows, in the sense that now you have informal communities and suburbs next to one another, covering more area of the world than earlier forms of the city – like Manhattan, London, or Paris.

I’m not so interested in whether it’s top-down or bottom-up – or bottom-down, for that matter – but in acknowledging that there is more of it in the world now than there are 20th century downtowns."

Subtopia: The Rule of Law Complex

2007-09-28T14:56:00.000-04:00

Subtopia: The Rule of Law Complex: "A few days ago I came across an AP news piece with a headline that read some 30 Iraqi judges have been killed in Iraq, underscoring need for tight security. The solution, we read, is a “new heavily secured justice complex in eastern Baghdad” better known as The Rule of Law Complex “that began operating last month” and is further described as a “mini-Green Zone” for judges, investigators and their families who are trying to avoid being the target of violence."

Blackwater USA - New York Times

2007-09-28T14:53:00.000-04:00

Blackwater USA - Iraq - Private Security Contractors - DynCorp International - Triple Canopy - Defense Department - New York Times: "With undisguised disdain, he fixed his gaze across the concrete toward two smaller helicopters taking off from a hangar operated by Blackwater USA — the private security company whose men, while guarding an American diplomatic convoy, were involved last week in a Baghdad shootout that killed at least eight people and, according to an Iraqi government report, as many as 20."

Blackwater Tops Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate - New York Times

2007-09-28T14:51:00.000-04:00

Blackwater Tops Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate - New York Times: "WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — The American security contractor Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials."

Note: Sarkis on Programming

2007-09-28T12:33:00.000-04:00

"programming took shape as a conscious practice in the immediate post-World War II period. Myth has it that it was derived from the process of downsizing military bases and cutting down on facility redundancies by coordinating different uses in the same space"

- Hashim Sarkis, CASE Book

Note: Green Zone as City Within City

2007-09-28T12:05:00.000-04:00

“The emblematic capital of this transformation is the Green Zone, the American encampment in Baghdad, where the 12-foot-high concrete slabs that surround Saddam Hussein’s former palaces have infused the city within a city with the ethos of the gated suburban enclaves of Southern California. It is a place with “the calm sterility of an American subdivision,” as described by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” not a place that expresses American ideals of democracy and political transparency.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/weekinreview/04ouroussoff.html?ref=weekinreview

Note: On postwar design

2007-09-28T12:00:00.001-04:00

Its like designing for a client, except that you expect some democratic variability of use pattern upon handover. A progressive handover seems to be the key, rather than a direct transfer of power (which is one-to-one). How to build this handover variability into the architecture? To maintain what's necessary but allow it to (d)evolve over time into...what?...'democracy' ?

Note: on Terrorists

2007-09-28T11:52:00.001-04:00

A terrorist using a cellular network to set off a bomb - enacting physical change through the comandeering of an infrastructural network and its deployment in an alternative fashion.

What about hezbollah doing urban planning? How the fuck are they thinking, doing, and organizing this shit? If they can do it, can't anyone? If they can make themselves look good, can't anyone?

Note: on Saskia Sassen Lecture

2007-09-28T11:42:00.001-04:00

Saskia Sassen, territory etc...

Intermediate economies

infrastructure as indeterminate, state of the art, and homogenous

shanghai, sao paolo, chicago are the 'sources' of knowledge economy...

specialized differences: hong kong and shanghai are different kinds of financial centers

these global cities are an assemblage that work as an infrastructure for the global economy

tensions between indeterminacy and specificity

me: maybe formal and tectonic indeterminacy with programmatic specificity

THESIS PROPOSAL DRAFT

2007-09-28T07:43:00.000-04:00

This is a copy of the Thesis Proposal (rough...) I submitted a little while ago.

Adriel Mesznik

Thesis Proposal

Advisor: Timothy Hyde

9-7-07

My thesis project will address the contemporary global proliferation of lawlessness. I will propose an architecture and a way of architecting that can effectively engage this lawless context. I will arrive at this proposal through the research of agents, productions, and techniques that are already engaged, successfully or not, with such lawlessness.

Lawlessness thrives in/on lawless zones. Zones explicitly beyond the reach of civil law. Zones outside of state control, or no longer exclusively or effectively under state control. Emerging or decaying, fleeting or permanent, conscious constructions or haphazard byproducts.

Warzones represent one extreme of lawlessness, zones outside the control of civil law, with their own complex legal structures, created by states outside of (but perhaps overlapping with) the territory of states themselves. Other examples might include: private security zones, airports, international waters, the internet, multinational corporations, megacities, gangland, no-man’s land…

In the end, though, I am interested in the architecture, the structures, of these zones. Structures that might define, comprise, support, conceal, locate, describe, choreograph, influence, coexist with, emerge from these zones of lawlessness. Architectures unique to a particular lawless zone or common to all. I am interested in the physical entities (and attendant processes and techniques) that are the definition, corollary, product, or byproduct of a particular lawless context or to lawlessness in general.

Currently, these architectures of lawlessness are considered unknown, irrelevant, or incidental to contemporary architectural discourse and practice. Architectural discourse and practice have become dangerously complacent in ignoring (willfully or otherwise) the proliferation and subsequent importance of such zones and their architectures (existing, emergent, implied, or potential). As a result, discourse is unable to successfully consider such zones, and practice unable to engage them. Architecture (as discipline and practice) remains locked in an increasingly anachronistic relationship with aging, ineffective powers that hold little or no purchase over or effectiveness within the expanding lawless zones. Architecture is becoming increasingly powerless and irrelevant, unable to recognize, much less engage, an increasingly large percentage of the world’s spaces.

This situation must be remedied if architecture is to remain the primary means of shaping the world around us.

The contemporary conditions of lawlessness are neither new nor unique. Nor are they uncharted or unnavigable. I will therefore turn to cotemporary and historical scenarios as precedent from which architecture can learn. I will be researching groups that engage such lawless zones and exercise agency within or over them, the techniques and practices they use to do so, and the results or products of their engagement that have some impact on or relationship with these zones.

I might observe the example of the US military as it restructures itself to function in newly redefined warzones, outsourcing to paramilitary corporations such as Blackwater and cooperating with non-governmental organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontieres. Research might involve looking at a Field Manual, a piece of hardware, a strategy, or an ideological shift. I might investigate pirates and privateers, terrorists and mercenaries, missionaries and explorers as agents that operate with varying degrees of efficacy or success within lawless zones…

The intent is to find precedents that will allow for the assembly of an architecture of lawlessness, a means for architecture as a discipline to exist within, engage with, and ultimately influence the structures of these zones of lawlessness.

Random helpful quotes-of-the-week:

“If organization, as reflected in architecture and urbanism, possesses disposition, the means to aggress or collude, it may also be an adversary or a competitor. It may be brittle or stretchy. Its software or hardware is capable of political manipulation or violence, and also capable of storing or unleashing this agency in its inception, planning, and building as well as its occupation. As it mixes with overt or covert lawlessness, architecture possesses the means to war.”

“…effective activism will now rarely look like classic resistance. Rather resistance may come cloaked in its opposite, just as capital can be cloaked in the costumes of resistance…the various masquerades of resistance need not correspond to those of a tragic counterculture with its principled self-valorizations – righteous dispositions they share with war.”

“Political practices often gravitate to one of several well-rehearsed roles: the earnest public servant, the political theorist, or the strident activist…”

“Piracy is a useful construct here – one that yields a continuum of characters from the privateer and military entrepreneur to the terrorist and murderer: enough variations on the confidence game to provide reflections of diplomats, viceroys, orgmen, and elected officials.”

Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence, pgs 7-11

Loos Testing Picasa

2007-09-28T06:45:00.000-04:00

Hello? Can you hear me now?

Electro the Image Tester

2007-09-28T06:14:00.001-04:00

Electro. Awesome. Our default mascot.

THE FIRST POST

2007-09-28T05:37:00.000-04:00

This is the inaugural post. Fitting that its at 5am, accompanied by heartburn.